ACS is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. It's quite impressive, and it's one of the oldest remaining American schools outside the US. As the Bulgarian Foreign Minister said last night, Abraham Lincoln was president in our school's first year. Tee hee. There are quite a few asterisks on this accomplishment: a few different American schools were founded in different parts of Bulgaria, then only merged to become the school we know today in the 1920s. Also, there's the small issue of being closed for almost 50 years during the Communist era. Still, there is a sense of tradition and history that is worthy of being honored. The biggest event for the year was a gala concert last night, raising money for the scholarship fund. The act was Vasko Vassilev, who I admit I had not heard of before this year, but is quite a phenomenon. He was a Bulgarian child prodigy at the violin, and has gone on to much success with the best orchestras of the world, and also done a lot of rocking, not-so-traditional music with a variety of collaborators. It's fun stuff. The concert last night was wonderful, as was the reception at the swanky military club afterwards. The holiday season is chock-full of special events that are all individually fun, but can sometimes be collectively overwhelming. Luckily, this event was worth it. I've posted a few very short video clips that give a feel for the show last night (we were close...only in row 3!). I smile each time I watch these (regrettably short) videos...it was such a fun concert! Great job, Vasko, and kudos to all that helped put this together.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Things students say (or write) UPDATED x3
I will likely update this periodically. Here are two things written in student homework this week.
This was at the end of an otherwise underwhelming student presentation on climate change, and when I asked her about it, she didn't actually know if she had thought of it herself or if she was quoting something she read. Still, I liked it and thought it was prophetic:
UPDATE #2: from a student ecology homework, talking about the competitive exclusion principle:
UPDATE #3
Me: So, how was the test?
Student 1: It was confusing.
Student 2: It was awesome!
UPDATE #4
"The law of natural selection has played its part in the faith of the moths." (emphasis mine)
"because frogs are r-rated, this helps them survive."
Indeed.
The next one just shows so much confusion and or fence-riding I thought it was impressive. Poor ESL skill are also part of the problem, I'm sure. The response was to a question about how energy flows and matter cycles through an ecosystem.
UPDATE #1It means that elements go through recycling in cycles in each ecosystem, while at the same time some energy is constantly getting lost and then gained by sunshine, etc. They are kind of the same, for there is an input and an output, and it is determined by which is bigger, whether there is a loss or a gain of the element or energy over time, although when considering energy there is always a gain as long as there is sunlight, and there is almost always a loss, when there isn't.
This was at the end of an otherwise underwhelming student presentation on climate change, and when I asked her about it, she didn't actually know if she had thought of it herself or if she was quoting something she read. Still, I liked it and thought it was prophetic:
“If we want things to stay as they are, everything must change.” S.V.
UPDATE #2: from a student ecology homework, talking about the competitive exclusion principle:
"In fact it is the physically stronger species that survives. The best known example of this is the paradox of plankton."I really have no idea what he was writing about, though I do think the "paradox of plankton" could be a cool band name.
UPDATE #3
Me: So, how was the test?
Student 1: It was confusing.
Student 2: It was awesome!
UPDATE #4
"The law of natural selection has played its part in the faith of the moths." (emphasis mine)
Friday, December 3, 2010
Paris for Thanksgiving
Ahhh, Paree!
I didn't expect to be as impressed by Paris as I am. What a beautiful, practical, friendly, and interesting city. Yes, I said friendly. As an American I feel like I am constantly told that the French hate us and go out of their way to be rude to us when we go to their country. Luckily for my first visit to France I found the exact opposite to be true. People were wonderful - every person that I talked to (except 1) was very nice and showed no disrespect to me. Several of them laughed when I couldn't find the affirmative to a question such as, "would you like a bag for this?" Every time I somehow managed to forget which of the many languages I don't know I should use, so instead of a simple "yes" (since most people understood English perfectly well), I would stammer: "Da!, uh, ah, Si!, no, uh, yeah!, arggg! I mean oui!" I laughed too. But somehow never got comfortable with "oui."
We spent 3 and a half days in Paris. Oddly enough, this summer while we were traveling through the Balkans, we met a wonderful Parisian couple, Elaine and Cedric. And luckily, they invited us to stay at their flat in Paris over Thanksgiving weekend. Such lovely hosts! Their flat is less than a block away from the metro system and several blocks away from two train stations - so getting there from the airport was a breeze, and getting to anywhere in the city was even easier. They fed us traditional French food - which means lots of cheese, wine, bread, and heavy flavorful foods. For our thanksgiving feast we had duck, mash (yummy greens), and these wonderful cheesy potatoes that I need to get the recipe for. Fabulous! Elaine and Cedric's friend, Stefan, joined us for Thanksgiving - he had lived in the US for many years and missed the Thanksgiving tradition.
Of course we visited some of the expected sites:
We also saw a couple of less-well-known sites:
Yup, that's right, we went from the highest heights in Paris (the Eiffel Tower) to the lowest lows, pee-yew!
Many thanks to our wonderful hosts for a wonderful visit! We hope to return the favor - although I don't know if we want to go into the Sofia sewers...
I didn't expect to be as impressed by Paris as I am. What a beautiful, practical, friendly, and interesting city. Yes, I said friendly. As an American I feel like I am constantly told that the French hate us and go out of their way to be rude to us when we go to their country. Luckily for my first visit to France I found the exact opposite to be true. People were wonderful - every person that I talked to (except 1) was very nice and showed no disrespect to me. Several of them laughed when I couldn't find the affirmative to a question such as, "would you like a bag for this?" Every time I somehow managed to forget which of the many languages I don't know I should use, so instead of a simple "yes" (since most people understood English perfectly well), I would stammer: "Da!, uh, ah, Si!, no, uh, yeah!, arggg! I mean oui!" I laughed too. But somehow never got comfortable with "oui."
We spent 3 and a half days in Paris. Oddly enough, this summer while we were traveling through the Balkans, we met a wonderful Parisian couple, Elaine and Cedric. And luckily, they invited us to stay at their flat in Paris over Thanksgiving weekend. Such lovely hosts! Their flat is less than a block away from the metro system and several blocks away from two train stations - so getting there from the airport was a breeze, and getting to anywhere in the city was even easier. They fed us traditional French food - which means lots of cheese, wine, bread, and heavy flavorful foods. For our thanksgiving feast we had duck, mash (yummy greens), and these wonderful cheesy potatoes that I need to get the recipe for. Fabulous! Elaine and Cedric's friend, Stefan, joined us for Thanksgiving - he had lived in the US for many years and missed the Thanksgiving tradition.
Of course we visited some of the expected sites:
Notre Dame
Before we went inside the sun was shining.
After spending about half an hour inside, we came outside to graupel - ice pellets.
(Elaine and Cedric didn't believe that was a real word)
The gargoyles and chimeras were really cool.
From the tower of Notre Dame we caught our first site of...
the Eiffel Tower
One of my favorite parts of the trip - we rode the elevators to the top.
Amazing views of the city from above. Breathtaking. Literally. It's way up there.
Musee d'Orsay
Turns out Jeff and I aren't really art gallery people.
We enjoyed some of the paintings, but without an art history background, we weren't drawn in.
And I guess we didn't take any pictures here,
but we did get pictures of the outside of the Louvre:
the Louvre
Being the art-not-lovers that we are, we got there too late to enter the museum itself,
but enjoyed looking at the range of architecture outside.
Sainte-Chappelle
They are cleaning all the stained glass, so we didn't get the full effect.
Still, it was quite beautiful and magical.
a wonderful playground behind Notre Dame
Watch this video - you will not be disappointed!
the Musee de l'Orangerie
This is where a set of Monet's Waterlillies is displayed as if you were in the middle of the garden.
I was determined to see these - they grow more interesting the longer you look at them.
the Sewer Museum
Yes, that's me, standing by a river of shit.
Fascinating, but disconcerting. We were told not to touch anything down there.
For a stinky museum it was actually quite informative and interesting.
Many thanks to our wonderful hosts for a wonderful visit! We hope to return the favor - although I don't know if we want to go into the Sofia sewers...
Flashback: Fjords and Glaciers and Slugs, Oh My (in Norway, July 2010)
Every time I see a giant slug or a giant snail I have to stop and get up really close and simply look at it. Such weird creatures. So cool and so "eeewwww" at the same time. I've gotten to see many different slugs and snails in many different places: banana slugs in northern California, giant snails in Switzerland, huge snails and nightcrawlers (double "eeewwww") here in Sofia, and this summer, giant black slugs in Norway (as seen below, this one is about 4 inches long). We saw about 30 of these guys on our hike above Bakka.
That's it for my slug report, now on to Fjords and Glaciers...
For our 2nd Anniversary we had a choice of going to a giant 4th of July party on our campus hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Bulgaria (around 2000 people were expected to show up) OR go to Norway. It was a tough choice since celebrating not only our nation's independence but also our anniversary in Bulgaria with thousands of expats and Bulgarians would be hard to beat in future years. But we decided that that one extra day of vacation in Norway was worth missing a huge party for. So early on July 4th we caught our flight to Bergen, Norway.
We spent two nights in Bergen - our first and last nights in Norway. Bergen is a UNESCO World Heritage site with these wonderfully askew and very colorful wooden buildings along the bay. There was also a lovely park at the top of the mountain in town (we got to ride another Funicular!) where we watched the sun set for our last night in Norway amidst the sounds of the distant Simple Minds concert.
We spent three nights in Gudvangen at the end of the Naerofjord (I probably spelled all of that wrong, but I've given up on trying to understand the Norwegian alphabet). We enjoyed some biking and hiking while staying there, along with taking some rides on the ferries. We visited Flam (that's /fluhm/ to you) where a giant cruise ship had disgorged it's passengers and the town was a madhouse for most of the day, but it became a ghost town after the last incredibly loud burst of the ship's horn faded away. We hiked to some beautiful waterfalls outside of Flam on one day, then took the Flamsbana (railway) 20 km up to Myrdal on another day - watching a cheesy light and song show part way up and riding on a train that turned 180 degrees in a tunnel. From Myrdal we hiked back to town and during the last 5 km we actually ran in order to attempt some semblance of training for our upcoming half-marathon in September outside of Vienna (more on that later).
The next two nights were spent in Jostedal near Jostedal National Park. We were warmly welcomed by Astrid Jostedal to her family's campground where we stayed in a lovely little cabin next to a glacial river (Jeff was crazy enough to jump in this river - brrrrr - but I only soaked my feet). We spent one day on a "sea"-kayak tour on a glacial lake to a glacier that we got to climb around for an afternoon. The water was so cold, but so beautiful. And it was exciting to stand next to huge fissures in the glacier (we were roped up, of course).
Norway definitely is the most expensive place we have traveled to so far - I hope nothing else is that expensive! But so worth it. I wish we could have stayed longer.
If you have some time, feel free to browse Jeff's Norway photo album on Flickr (I don't yet know how to embed the slideshow - I'll try to figure it out and fix it later).
UPDATE: The Flickr slideshow is now embedded below. Click on the picture by the big play button to view the photos. To view them full screen, click on the little square in the lower right of the Flickr box that looks like four arrows pointing to the corners. You can toggle the descriptions/titles on/off by clicking the "X" by the title in the upper right or by hitting the "show info" link in the upper right.
That's it for my slug report, now on to Fjords and Glaciers...
For our 2nd Anniversary we had a choice of going to a giant 4th of July party on our campus hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Bulgaria (around 2000 people were expected to show up) OR go to Norway. It was a tough choice since celebrating not only our nation's independence but also our anniversary in Bulgaria with thousands of expats and Bulgarians would be hard to beat in future years. But we decided that that one extra day of vacation in Norway was worth missing a huge party for. So early on July 4th we caught our flight to Bergen, Norway.
We spent two nights in Bergen - our first and last nights in Norway. Bergen is a UNESCO World Heritage site with these wonderfully askew and very colorful wooden buildings along the bay. There was also a lovely park at the top of the mountain in town (we got to ride another Funicular!) where we watched the sun set for our last night in Norway amidst the sounds of the distant Simple Minds concert.
We spent three nights in Gudvangen at the end of the Naerofjord (I probably spelled all of that wrong, but I've given up on trying to understand the Norwegian alphabet). We enjoyed some biking and hiking while staying there, along with taking some rides on the ferries. We visited Flam (that's /fluhm/ to you) where a giant cruise ship had disgorged it's passengers and the town was a madhouse for most of the day, but it became a ghost town after the last incredibly loud burst of the ship's horn faded away. We hiked to some beautiful waterfalls outside of Flam on one day, then took the Flamsbana (railway) 20 km up to Myrdal on another day - watching a cheesy light and song show part way up and riding on a train that turned 180 degrees in a tunnel. From Myrdal we hiked back to town and during the last 5 km we actually ran in order to attempt some semblance of training for our upcoming half-marathon in September outside of Vienna (more on that later).
The next two nights were spent in Jostedal near Jostedal National Park. We were warmly welcomed by Astrid Jostedal to her family's campground where we stayed in a lovely little cabin next to a glacial river (Jeff was crazy enough to jump in this river - brrrrr - but I only soaked my feet). We spent one day on a "sea"-kayak tour on a glacial lake to a glacier that we got to climb around for an afternoon. The water was so cold, but so beautiful. And it was exciting to stand next to huge fissures in the glacier (we were roped up, of course).
Norway definitely is the most expensive place we have traveled to so far - I hope nothing else is that expensive! But so worth it. I wish we could have stayed longer.
If you have some time, feel free to browse Jeff's Norway photo album on Flickr (I don't yet know how to embed the slideshow - I'll try to figure it out and fix it later).
UPDATE: The Flickr slideshow is now embedded below. Click on the picture by the big play button to view the photos. To view them full screen, click on the little square in the lower right of the Flickr box that looks like four arrows pointing to the corners. You can toggle the descriptions/titles on/off by clicking the "X" by the title in the upper right or by hitting the "show info" link in the upper right.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Flashback: Climbing Maroon Bells Peak in Colorado (July 2010)
I have plenty of things to write about in the last few months, but since I already have these pictures uploaded, I thought I'd give you a brief post about Andris and I's little mountain adventure back in July.
If you've ever seen a photo calendar of Colorado, you've probably seen the peak we climbed (pictured above). We climbed the peak on the left (South Maroon Bells peak, or sometimes just "Maroon Peak," that appears slightly lower (but is actually slightly higher).
Andris flew in to Denver (thanks!) Wednesday night, and because we're getting older and wiser, we decided to NOT try to directly climb something really high and stupid on Thursday. We waited until Friday for that. Last time we tried something similar, in 2005, Andris was also flying in from sea level (different coast then), and got himself a nice little case of altitude sickness. This time we slept at 7,000 ft the first night, then about 9,000 ft the second night before attempting to summit Maroon Bells peak (14,156 ft) near Aspen. The excellent route description we followed is available free at 14ers.org, and Andris even had it downloaded as a PDF on his phone. Hilarious. As a disclaimer for this route, 14ers.org says:
"This route holds some dangerous terrain and plenty of tedious route finding. Attempt the route only if you are in good shape, have ample time, and a favorable weather forecast." I agree on all counts.
Our drive-in forest service campground (Silver Bells, I think) was well located, pretty cheap, and had a great view. We were up and off to the trailhead before 5 am, trying to get the alpine start everyone loves so much. We hiked in the dark the first hour or so, before seeing the first alpenglow on the peaks near Crater Lake. The hike was uneventful as it stayed on the trail, but after about 1.5 hours, we had to leave the proper trail, as the route from there out was pretty much just UP. Almost 3,000 feet up, up, up the "massive East slope" to the ridge. There was not much of a trail, and all the rocks were loose and occasionally knocked loose. We put on our climbing helmets (SAFETY FIRST!) for protection from loose rock.
Colorado was in the middle of a July high-pressure heat wave. It was over 100F down in Denver, and still quite toasty up in the mountains. There was not a cloud in the sky the entire day, and we were above treeline and exposed to the high mountain sun from about 7 am to 6 pm...we got a little fried.
Once we attained the ridge, the hard part of the climb began. There is not any trail at all up here, just a suggested route picking your way around the rock outcroppings, talus slopes, and occasionaly precipitous drop-offs. There were about a half-dozen other climbers going our direction at about the same time, and given the narrow/sketchy nature of the climb, we kind of teamed up and took care of each other. A few times we saw some mountain goats flaunting their four legs and hooves, merrily scrambling up and over things we fretted cautiously over.
We successfully attained the summit (the view were amazing...up to 100 miles in some directions), and then, perhaps surprisingly, chose not to attempt the South Maroon Peak-North Maroon Peak traverse. I guess we are getting older and wiser. It would have meant another 14er to "bag", but I couldn't see how the view would be much different (only a few hundred meters away, and a little lower), traverse is considered sketchier than what we'd already done, and Andris was suffering a bit of mild altitude sickness. The mountain will be there next time. Another day.
On the way down, the technical scrambling was just as hard, probably more so with tired legs. Descending the "massive East slope" was awful. We could see where we were going for about 2 hours, but just had to pick our way slowly slowly slowly down, trying not to knock too many boulders down on each other off the steep unconsolidated slope. By the time we made it off the slope, we were thrilled to be on a semi-flat ground a real trail again. (See the picture of Andris hugging a tree at the bottom.) We still had another 2+ hours of hiking left, but it was uneventful trail walking. It was a long day: 15+ hours of hiking, 12 miles roundtrip, 4,800 ft of elevation gain. It was also a fabulous day in the wilderness. Thanks Andris, and thanks Colorado. See you next time!
My Flickr Slideshow is posted below. You can view it small embedded below, or (recommended) full-screen by clicking the button on the lower-right of the slideshow embedded image, the one that looks like four arrows pointing out to each corner. From this full-screen view, you can change the speed of the slideshow, and also toggle descriptions ("show info") on/off with the buttons on the upper right.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The kids are alright.
Teaching is hard. Often times you end up in an adversarial relationship with students, or they fall asleep in your class, or they give you a hard time about grades. It's easy to start seeing them as your opponents, or as a mass of 140+ vessels to pour knowledge into. That's why it's important to occasionally have days like today.
Shannon was the lead organizer for our school's participation in a Bulgaria-wide volunteer day, sponsored in part by the American Chamber of Commerce in Bulgaria ("AmCham"). She decided our school would contribute by joining a clean-up in Vitosha Nature Park, on the big lovely mountain near Sofia. Shannon recruited over 70 teachers and students to give up their Saturday to go pick up trash in the woods. Almost half the group came associated with the hiking club, which I advise. Thankfully the weather was just stupendous for late October: not a cloud in the sky, crisp air (temps in the high 40s F), and painfully pretty fall colors all over the mountain (boy, since I'd lived out West so long, I didn't realize how much I'd missed living in a deciduous forest!). This weather was extra welcome as it was probably only the 3rd or 4th sunny day the entire month -- we've had a lot of cold rainy gloom.
We spent 4 hours wandering around in the woods, breaking up illegal fire rings, picking up beer bottles, plastic bags, broken glass, random scrap metal, bits of old high-voltage electrical wiring (!), some condoms, old nasty toilet paper, soda cans, chip bags, the whole bit. Because of all the leaves fallen in autumn, we had to kick the leaves around on the ground to uncover such finds. We had 60 kids hiking to pick up trash, for fun! The only real complaint for the day from most of them was that the places we were sent didn't have enough trash for them to pick up.It was great. The kids were having a grand old time wandering through the woods, searching for "buried treasure."
After teaching in litigation-happy California, I got used to trying to keep a close-eye on students, making sure things were in control. I had to be in less control here, partly because my poor Bulgarian skills mean I had to ask kids to interpret directions or signs, but also because the students here are just a lot more independent. Sometimes a few kids would wander off out of sight as they picked up trash, and I'd get a little nervous, then they happily come bouncing back 10 minutes with a few more items in their trash bags. Trustworthy, reliable, and good-natured.
After the 4 hour trash pick-up, about half the hiking club kids wanted to stick around to go for an actual hike. We took a rickety old chair lift up to the top of the ridge, then spent 3 delightful hours hiking back down to civilization. It was all-smiles, all-day. Happy kids, hiking in the woods. No one complained, just happy chatter on a lovely fall day. It was nice to just talk to them, to play, to enjoy being outside together, breathing fresh air, crunching fallen leaves underfoot. I even snuck in a few ecology lessons, but only if they didn't mind the school talk. :)
As we neared the suburb of Simeonovo at the end of our hike (almost 9 hours after we first met), we came to a popular picnic area that was suffering the effects of being a popular picnic area. There was plenty of trash here, more that we'd seen in most of the areas of our trash-pick-up session.
"Mr. J, do you have any more of those trash bags left? Are there any more latex gloves?"
At the end of a long day, with absolutely no prompting, the students decided to stop and pick up more trash.
They hit that area hard for 20 minutes, until we had to push them to leave because it was getting dark. All the way down to the bus stop they picked up trash, which got a little overwhelming as we got more and more into the city. It was inspiring.
Yeah, the kids are alright.
Shannon was the lead organizer for our school's participation in a Bulgaria-wide volunteer day, sponsored in part by the American Chamber of Commerce in Bulgaria ("AmCham"). She decided our school would contribute by joining a clean-up in Vitosha Nature Park, on the big lovely mountain near Sofia. Shannon recruited over 70 teachers and students to give up their Saturday to go pick up trash in the woods. Almost half the group came associated with the hiking club, which I advise. Thankfully the weather was just stupendous for late October: not a cloud in the sky, crisp air (temps in the high 40s F), and painfully pretty fall colors all over the mountain (boy, since I'd lived out West so long, I didn't realize how much I'd missed living in a deciduous forest!). This weather was extra welcome as it was probably only the 3rd or 4th sunny day the entire month -- we've had a lot of cold rainy gloom.
We spent 4 hours wandering around in the woods, breaking up illegal fire rings, picking up beer bottles, plastic bags, broken glass, random scrap metal, bits of old high-voltage electrical wiring (!), some condoms, old nasty toilet paper, soda cans, chip bags, the whole bit. Because of all the leaves fallen in autumn, we had to kick the leaves around on the ground to uncover such finds. We had 60 kids hiking to pick up trash, for fun! The only real complaint for the day from most of them was that the places we were sent didn't have enough trash for them to pick up.It was great. The kids were having a grand old time wandering through the woods, searching for "buried treasure."
After teaching in litigation-happy California, I got used to trying to keep a close-eye on students, making sure things were in control. I had to be in less control here, partly because my poor Bulgarian skills mean I had to ask kids to interpret directions or signs, but also because the students here are just a lot more independent. Sometimes a few kids would wander off out of sight as they picked up trash, and I'd get a little nervous, then they happily come bouncing back 10 minutes with a few more items in their trash bags. Trustworthy, reliable, and good-natured.
After the 4 hour trash pick-up, about half the hiking club kids wanted to stick around to go for an actual hike. We took a rickety old chair lift up to the top of the ridge, then spent 3 delightful hours hiking back down to civilization. It was all-smiles, all-day. Happy kids, hiking in the woods. No one complained, just happy chatter on a lovely fall day. It was nice to just talk to them, to play, to enjoy being outside together, breathing fresh air, crunching fallen leaves underfoot. I even snuck in a few ecology lessons, but only if they didn't mind the school talk. :)
As we neared the suburb of Simeonovo at the end of our hike (almost 9 hours after we first met), we came to a popular picnic area that was suffering the effects of being a popular picnic area. There was plenty of trash here, more that we'd seen in most of the areas of our trash-pick-up session.
"Mr. J, do you have any more of those trash bags left? Are there any more latex gloves?"
At the end of a long day, with absolutely no prompting, the students decided to stop and pick up more trash.
They hit that area hard for 20 minutes, until we had to push them to leave because it was getting dark. All the way down to the bus stop they picked up trash, which got a little overwhelming as we got more and more into the city. It was inspiring.
Yeah, the kids are alright.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
"I've been smiling so much my jaw hurts."
Shannon likes to dance. A lot. Especially line dances and Balkan dances and things with steps (more so than random going-to-the-club dancing). So she was very excited when the wonderful PE teacher and volunteer Balkan dance instructor Stoyan organized a dinner and dancing outing with the group of teachers, parents, friends, and community members that have been Balkan dancing with Stoyan. The restaurant при братовчеда (Pri Bratovcheda, or "The Cousins'") is located in an unlikely spot: the interchange between two of Sofia's largest streets, nearly _in_ the interchange. Step inside though, and the roar of traffic is replaced with the happy sound of people dancing and raising their glasses in celebration. There was live music appropriate to dance a variety of "horos" (the line dances that many Americans associate with Greek dancing, but is popular all over the Balkans). The tables are set with traditional festive table cloths and Bulgarian pottery, and the traditional Bulgarian food looked tasty (I only sampled the fried potatoes with cheese (пуржени картофи съц сирене), which I can whole-heartedly recommend. The restaurant is not very big, so when the dances get going they wind in-and-out of all the tables, even outside the restaurant then back in another door.
I arrived 2+ hours later than Shannon, as I apparently needed a longer post-Open House nap than she did. When I arrived, she was all sweaty and smiley, telling my "I've been smiling so much my jaw hurts." Excellent.
Thanks Stoyan, for putting this together. This was a relatively rare chance to socialize with a broader mix of people (especially Bulgarian) than we usually get a chance to do, and it was just plain fun.
Below are two poor quality (but effective) videos I shot with my phone that give you a sense of the music, atmosphere, and dancing. Enjoy.
Video #1
Video #2
I arrived 2+ hours later than Shannon, as I apparently needed a longer post-Open House nap than she did. When I arrived, she was all sweaty and smiley, telling my "I've been smiling so much my jaw hurts." Excellent.
Thanks Stoyan, for putting this together. This was a relatively rare chance to socialize with a broader mix of people (especially Bulgarian) than we usually get a chance to do, and it was just plain fun.
Below are two poor quality (but effective) videos I shot with my phone that give you a sense of the music, atmosphere, and dancing. Enjoy.
Video #1
Video #2
Friday, October 1, 2010
This is just a test...
It seemed like a nice day to go outside with the class.
It's a crisp, sunny day to ring in October, and we're studying ecology, so I set up a grid on the softball field and had my IB students start counting and comparing populations of different species of grass. It was not a particularly challenging activity, but reasonably interesting, applicable to the unit, and pleasant on a Friday afternoon. Then the air raid sirens went off.
Our campus shares space with the National Police Academy, and we are lucky enough to have the LOUDSPEAKERS (and I do mean LOUD) they use for emergency signals for our part of town. I think there are only 5 or 6 of these LOUDSPEAKERS for the whole city of Sofia, so they're designed to project. And project they do. You can hear the announcement bouncing and echoing off the mountains several kilometers away. There was a serious loud announcement of "this is only a test" (or something like it...my Bulgarian's not so good), then dead air, then SIRENS SIRENS SIRENS for a minute, then dead air.."Is this thing on? CLICK CLICK CLICK" [sounds like someone being shot]...SIRENS SIRENS SIRENS (but different this time..more like an alien invasion). All told, there were air raid sirens going off for 10 full minutes, at volumes where you really couldn't hear someone yelling at you 1 foot away. They're designed to be heard for several kilometers, and we were only about 50 meters from the speakers. It was plenty loud where we were. Luckily, this was an unannounced (at least to us) test, although I'm not sure what I would have done had I known. Below is a short video recorded while we were outside trying to count the flowers. Make sure your speakers are set to a normal volume to appropriately appreciate this Bulgarian moment. Whee!
It's a crisp, sunny day to ring in October, and we're studying ecology, so I set up a grid on the softball field and had my IB students start counting and comparing populations of different species of grass. It was not a particularly challenging activity, but reasonably interesting, applicable to the unit, and pleasant on a Friday afternoon. Then the air raid sirens went off.
Our campus shares space with the National Police Academy, and we are lucky enough to have the LOUDSPEAKERS (and I do mean LOUD) they use for emergency signals for our part of town. I think there are only 5 or 6 of these LOUDSPEAKERS for the whole city of Sofia, so they're designed to project. And project they do. You can hear the announcement bouncing and echoing off the mountains several kilometers away. There was a serious loud announcement of "this is only a test" (or something like it...my Bulgarian's not so good), then dead air, then SIRENS SIRENS SIRENS for a minute, then dead air.."Is this thing on? CLICK CLICK CLICK" [sounds like someone being shot]...SIRENS SIRENS SIRENS (but different this time..more like an alien invasion). All told, there were air raid sirens going off for 10 full minutes, at volumes where you really couldn't hear someone yelling at you 1 foot away. They're designed to be heard for several kilometers, and we were only about 50 meters from the speakers. It was plenty loud where we were. Luckily, this was an unannounced (at least to us) test, although I'm not sure what I would have done had I known. Below is a short video recorded while we were outside trying to count the flowers. Make sure your speakers are set to a normal volume to appropriately appreciate this Bulgarian moment. Whee!
Friday, September 24, 2010
Dear Chase MasterCard
I LIVE IN BULGARIA! That is in Europe. So when I make a purchase in "Austria????" that is not as ridiculous as you think, especially because I have told you on a monthly basis for the last year that I LIVE IN BULGARIA, and Bulgaria is Europe. So when your fraud detection shuts off my card because I bought gasoline in "Croatia????", that's not even as far as when I drove my car from Montana to Denver. It seems far, because it's Europe, but it's not, because I live there. Here, actually. I live in Europe.
Do you remember last month, when I told you "I LIVE IN EUROPE," and you very politely (thanks for that, by the way) told me that this time, you've really made a note in my account? Do you remember that? Because it was kind of like the month before. And kind of like last August. And last September. And last November. Quite a bit like last December, in fact. Vaguely similar to January and February too. I appreciate that your employees are polite, because we chat more than I do with most of my family. I hope your computer system has room for a lot of notes. Lots of notes in there.
Also, I think it is pretty neat when your fraud detection system decides that a purchase I made in Austria was clearly fraudulent, so it locks down the card. (You've gotten pretty good at doing that.) It's extra helpful that you don't tell me you've done this, because it makes a fun detective game on a Friday night trying to figure out why I can't buy something this time. You earn high marks for cleverness, by the way, by also keeping this a secret from your first-level call center representatives (who are polite, by the way). They are definitely not to be trusted. Sure, they can take the hold off my account for the purchase I just tried to make, but they too will be surprised when even after they've "fixed" it, the card still doesn't work, because you've placed the card on triple-secret probation. That's very secure, so thanks for that.
Just to keep things interesting, I appreciate how your fraud detection system didn't have a problem with me buying gas in Tirana, Albania (nothing weird about that), but CROATIA? Someone surely stole my card! And what diligence: good on you for not believing me when I called you after the fact and verified that it was in fact, me buying gas in Croatia. Surely any crook could call your fraud center and know my social security number, ZIP code, date of birth, and mother's maiden name. I couldn't trick you guys -- so you made me also respond to an email the next day. If there's anywhere short of Fort Knox that's secure, it is certainly my Yahoo email account. No thieves or Nigerian Lottery winners allowed.
If I were allowed to buy anything with my Chase mastercard, I'd use it to send you a thank-you present as a token of my appreciation. I'd buy you a map to hang on your call-center wall, and circle Bulgaria. Maybe I'd even circle Europe, because that's where I live.
Thanks.
-Guy living in Bulgaria
Do you remember last month, when I told you "I LIVE IN EUROPE," and you very politely (thanks for that, by the way) told me that this time, you've really made a note in my account? Do you remember that? Because it was kind of like the month before. And kind of like last August. And last September. And last November. Quite a bit like last December, in fact. Vaguely similar to January and February too. I appreciate that your employees are polite, because we chat more than I do with most of my family. I hope your computer system has room for a lot of notes. Lots of notes in there.
Also, I think it is pretty neat when your fraud detection system decides that a purchase I made in Austria was clearly fraudulent, so it locks down the card. (You've gotten pretty good at doing that.) It's extra helpful that you don't tell me you've done this, because it makes a fun detective game on a Friday night trying to figure out why I can't buy something this time. You earn high marks for cleverness, by the way, by also keeping this a secret from your first-level call center representatives (who are polite, by the way). They are definitely not to be trusted. Sure, they can take the hold off my account for the purchase I just tried to make, but they too will be surprised when even after they've "fixed" it, the card still doesn't work, because you've placed the card on triple-secret probation. That's very secure, so thanks for that.
Just to keep things interesting, I appreciate how your fraud detection system didn't have a problem with me buying gas in Tirana, Albania (nothing weird about that), but CROATIA? Someone surely stole my card! And what diligence: good on you for not believing me when I called you after the fact and verified that it was in fact, me buying gas in Croatia. Surely any crook could call your fraud center and know my social security number, ZIP code, date of birth, and mother's maiden name. I couldn't trick you guys -- so you made me also respond to an email the next day. If there's anywhere short of Fort Knox that's secure, it is certainly my Yahoo email account. No thieves or Nigerian Lottery winners allowed.
If I were allowed to buy anything with my Chase mastercard, I'd use it to send you a thank-you present as a token of my appreciation. I'd buy you a map to hang on your call-center wall, and circle Bulgaria. Maybe I'd even circle Europe, because that's where I live.
Thanks.
-Guy living in Bulgaria
Sunday, September 12, 2010
The Amazing Race - U2 Edition
Sunday Night, 10pm
Current location: Beirut, Lebanon
The Clue: get to a U2 concert 24 hours from now, then be back to work in Sofia, Bulgaria on Tuesday morning. Use every form of transport possible. The team that does not get to work on Tuesday morning might get fired. Bonus points for seeing the opening band.
Only flight from Beirut to Istanbul (that we could afford): Monday at 7 AM.
With no more than 4 hours of sleep per night since we left for our trip to Beirut (see these two posts from Jeff for all the details of our stay in Beirut: here and here), Jeff and I bade goodbye to Beirut and our friends Andris and Prairie to catch a 5 AM cab to the Beirut airport on Monday morning. We had about 2.5 hours of sleep this night. The streets of Beirut were very sleepy on a Monday morning. So were we. The flight from Beirut to Istanbul was uneventful. I read. Jeff managed to sleep a little bit. TRANSPORT: plane.
We arrived at Sabiha Gokcen International Airport on the Asian side of Istanbul at around 9 AM. This was about an hour away from the European part of Istanbul and where we had a hotel. Although Jeff had some information on transit options from this airport, we still had a hard time finding the right bus as few of them were labeled. Luckily, Jeff is much more outgoing than I am, so he asked a couple of different people and got us on the right bus. After about 50 minutes we were let off at the bus and ferry station. TRANSPORT: bus.
Having had no breakfast yet (except a small snack on the plane), we were immediately drawn to the pretzel stand and then to the doner stand. With our bellies temporarily full, we headed into the madness of a bus and ferry station on a Monday morning. We went to several wrong ticket booths: one for the buses, one for a tour ferry, a confusing electronic ticket dispenser, and finally found a person to sell us the tokens to get on the ferry across the Bosphorus to European Istanbul. A mere 1.5 Turkish Lira each (about $1). Seated on an upper deck outside, we enjoyed watching as our ferry dodged the innumerable cargo boats headed to and from the Golden Horn of Istanbul. Not a bad price for a cruise from Asia to Europe. TRANSPORT: ferry.
Off the boat into a tram for another 1.5 Turkish Lira each and we were off to Sultanahmet, the touristy area of Istanbul that we both have been to before (Jeff 2 more times than me with friends and family). We got off the tram near the Hagia Sofia and Blue Mosque and walked the rest of the way to our hotel hoping fervently that our room was ready (it was only about noon) so we could take a nap before working on actually getting our tickets to the night's show. Hallelujah! The room was available. And quite nice! A lovely place called the Tashkonak Hotel. Next it was time for a 3-hour nap. TRANSPORT: tram/train, by foot.
Luckily we set an alarm because we were both so exhausted that we passed out completely in our comfy bed at Tashkonak. Our next task was to figure out where to get our tickets. We had already purchased them online, but we'd gotten mixed messages about where we should actually pick them up: the first message said we HAD to get them at the stadium, and the second email said that we could NOT get them at the stadium, but instead had to get them at a Biletix outlet near Taksim Square. Considering that Ataturk Olympic Stadium was generally agreed to be in the middle of nowhere, and our most recent email said go to the Ticketmaster-owned Biletix, we decided to try that first. We walked again to the tram, rode it to the end of the line, and hopped on the nearest (OK, the only) funicular to get to Taksim Square (we love funiculars!). Arriving at insanely-busy Taksim Square we navigated our way out by following the trolley rails to the bookstore that had the Biletix outlet. And a line coming out the door. It was 5:15 PM. Opening band Snow Patrol was supposed to go on stage at 7:30 PM. We did not expect to wait in line here. TRANSPORT: tram/train, by foot, funicular.
I grabbed a spot in the line while Jeff went and asked a bunch of people if this was the right line. Or at least tried. Many people did not speak English, but he was lucky enough to find a group who spoke English that told him they had been in the line for 1.5 hours already! And they weren't even in the door to the bookstore yet! Was the line even moving? This is when we started worrying. Were we going to miss U2?! After all we did to make this happen?! I tried to be optimistic and assumed the people he talked to were just exaggerating. An hour later Jeff went to get us some food. He asked more people and everyone seemed to think we were in the right place. We wondered if we should just get to the stadium and hope our tickets were there, but we decided that since we were already in line and had waited an hour we might as well see it through. Plus the stadium was really far away and we'd really be in trouble if we got there and needed to get our tickets from here. Meanwhile we were trying to figure out how to actually get to the stadium which by some accounts was 2 hours away. After waiting in line for 2.5 miserable hours, we handed over our reservation number only to have the nice man (only one guy running this show) tell us he couldn't help us. We had to go to the stadium.
Both of us almost burst into tears right there. I stormed out and Jeff followed me wondering if I was going to go postal. I was seething! How did it take so damn long for the line to move?! It's a pretty simple process: I want/have a reservation for a ticket. Here's my money/reservation confirmation. Print ticket. Bye bye, have fun at the show! Seriously! How was that line so impossibly slow?! And why were we stupid enough to stay in it all that time? It was 7:30 PM. Snow Patrol was on. Damn. U2 was on in an hour and a half. Double-damn. Could we get to the stadium in time to see this band that I've been dreaming of seeing for over 20 years?! TRANSPORT: none.
I wanted to cry, but I also knew that that wasn't going to help us get to the show. So we speed-walked back to the Square in hopes of getting a taxi. But no one spoke English and no one had any idea where we wanted to go. U2? Really? You haven't heard of the biggest band to ever play a concert in Istanbul? There are posters all over town. Whatever. The subway then. So down, down, down into the bowels of Istanbul. Two stops down the line, then up, up, up to find a bus to Yenibosna where we might be able to find another bus for the concert or maybe could grab a taxi. As we were searching for the right bus, we found a couple of Turkish guys that were also heading to the concert, so we asked if we could latch on to them to make sure we didn't get lost (they admitted to not knowing how to get there either, but at least they spoke Turkish!). The bus slowly got so packed that we couldn't move but we suffered from the smell of humanity for 14 stops to get to Yenibosna. Off the bus we asked our new Turkish "friends" if we could share a taxi with them. And let me tell you, I wish I'd gotten this taxi driver's card, because if I ever need to get anywhere in Istanbul, this guy will get me there. I've never been in a car that had such an aggressive driver. He kept calling someone who was paying attention to the traffic for the concert, so we new there was a nasty traffic jam at the stadium. But that didn't faze this guy. In and out of traffic. Driving down the shoulder. Pushing his way past vehicles 10 times his size. More in and out of traffic. Driving off an exit then back on an on-ramp, just to pass a few cars. Suddenly he decided to go the other direction, then into some side streets. Not really side streets, actually, but a small village. Where was this village in the greater metropolitan Istanbul area? Who knows? Jeff and I had no idea where we were. I guess that was good because I would have started freaking out if I knew he was going AWAY from the stadium. But somehow he wound his way through some neighborhoods and business parks and finally, there it was. The stadium in all its glory. And hardly anyone there! It was after 9 PM and it looked like absolutely nothing was happening in the stadium and that it was barely half-full (is this the right place??). And the friendly Turkish guys didn't even let us pay for part of the taxi ride! TRANSPORT: subway, bus, craziest/best taxi ride ever.
But we still didn't have tickets. This is when we started joking about the amazing race and the title of this post was born. From one person to the next we kept asking "official" looking people where we were supposed to go to pick up our tickets. No, not this booth, you have to go to K section. You should run, they might be closing. We ran. No, not here. Try the next gate. Hmmmm. I'm not sure. OK, I'll let you in here. No, this is not the right place. ARGH! Now I know what it's like to want to pull your hair out. Finally, a nice young man actually walked with us to the correct booth - he even said that no one there really knew what was going on. Truly the organization of this show was pretty dismal. So, at about 9:45 PM we FINALLY had our tickets in hand. Just had to walk half-way around the stadium to get to our seats. And U2 wasn't playing yet, so we didn't miss any of their show. Too bad about Snow Patrol - no bonus points for us. I wanted to see them and this was their last show on the U2 tour. Such is life or "такъв е жхвотът" in Bulgarian. TRANSPORT: by foot - walking and running.
You have to see this stadium to believe it. It looks like either it's still under construction or that it's been left to rot. It looks like it could be a beautiful place for shows, but it is in pretty bad condition. I guess it was finished in 2002 in hopes of winning the bid for the 2008 Olympics, but has been rarely used. It seats almost 80,000 and certainly has the capacity for 100,000 with standing on the floor. But tonight it was only half-full. 50,000 people showed up to see U2, but it seemed so much smaller than that ("only" 50,000, on their first time ever playing in Turkey, with the cheapest tickets on the whole European tour?!?). There were barely any people sitting in our section but there were people sitting in our seats. On any other day I probably would've just sat somewhere else. Not today. Today we went through so much to get those tickets, no one but Jeff and I were going to sit in those two seats. The girl I made move certainly gave me a look like I was an idiot, but how was she to know what a crazy day I had? We made it. TRANSPORT: by foot, with beer in hand.
OMG! U2! LIVE! Need I say more? :) Almost a week later and I'm still thrilled by it. In fact, as Jeff and I were discussing who would write the Beirut blog and who would write the U2 blog, he said something along the lines of, "That smile every time U2 is mentioned means you're doing the U2 blog." I'll put the set list at the end if anyone is interested. OMG! It was awesome! Some of my younger coworkers here who think I'm an old fuddy-duddy since I don't go out that often would not have believed their eyes that I was up til 12:30 AM dancing at a concert. Fantastic! Oh so worth all the difficulties of getting there. TRANSPORT: U2 LIVE! I was in heaven!
Now we had to figure out how to get back to our hotel so we could catch one or two winks before getting on a plane back to Sofia. After the show we just followed the crowds hoping to find a line of taxis or maybe even some of the buses set up for the event. We piled onto a minibus that seats about 12 people but by the time we started rolling had at least 30 people in it. I could only hold on to Jeff while we were tossed around as the bus made turns. It was so tight that no one could possible fall. We were sardines for 20 minutes. At least we didn't pay, because the guy collecting money literally could not reach us. Next we got onto another (bigger, but no less packed) bus towards the main part of the city. Some locals convinced us the trams would still be running, so get off at such and such stop. A few other gullible people got off as well and we all discovered that the trams were not, in fact, running at 1 in the morning. We found a pair of ladies from Slovenia to share a cab with and half an hour or so later we found ourselves a couple of blocks from our hotel. In bed about 1:45 AM. TRANSPORT: by foot, minibus, bus, taxi.
An early morning taxi got us to the airport for our flight to Sofia. Phew. We made it work on Tuesday with but a few hours of sleep, but still buzzing from the concert. What a weekend! I think this past weekend was the closest we have come to anything like the Amazing Race.
Thanks for reading my brain dump. Hope you enjoyed it!
-Shannon
U2 360 Tour
Istanbul/Turkey
6 September 2010
Setlist
Return of the Stingray Guitar
Beautiful Day - Always Forever Now
New Year's Day
Get On Your Boots
Magnificent
Mysterious Ways - My Sweet Lord
Elevation
Until The End Of The World
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
Pride (In the Name of Love)
In A Little While
Miss Sarajevo
City of Blinding Lights
Vertigo
I'll Go Crazy... (remix) - Discotheque - John I'm Only Dancing
Sunday Bloody Sunday - Get Up Stand Up
Mothers of the Disappeared (Bono was joined on stage by Turkish folk singer, Zulfu Livaneli, to sing this song, and then Zulfu, along with help from the crowd sang his own song: Yigidim Aslanim)
Walk On - You'll Never Walk Alone
One
Amazing Grace - Where the Streets Have No Name
Ultraviolet
With or Without You
Moment of Surrender
Current location: Beirut, Lebanon
The Clue: get to a U2 concert 24 hours from now, then be back to work in Sofia, Bulgaria on Tuesday morning. Use every form of transport possible. The team that does not get to work on Tuesday morning might get fired. Bonus points for seeing the opening band.
Only flight from Beirut to Istanbul (that we could afford): Monday at 7 AM.
With no more than 4 hours of sleep per night since we left for our trip to Beirut (see these two posts from Jeff for all the details of our stay in Beirut: here and here), Jeff and I bade goodbye to Beirut and our friends Andris and Prairie to catch a 5 AM cab to the Beirut airport on Monday morning. We had about 2.5 hours of sleep this night. The streets of Beirut were very sleepy on a Monday morning. So were we. The flight from Beirut to Istanbul was uneventful. I read. Jeff managed to sleep a little bit. TRANSPORT: plane.
We arrived at Sabiha Gokcen International Airport on the Asian side of Istanbul at around 9 AM. This was about an hour away from the European part of Istanbul and where we had a hotel. Although Jeff had some information on transit options from this airport, we still had a hard time finding the right bus as few of them were labeled. Luckily, Jeff is much more outgoing than I am, so he asked a couple of different people and got us on the right bus. After about 50 minutes we were let off at the bus and ferry station. TRANSPORT: bus.
Having had no breakfast yet (except a small snack on the plane), we were immediately drawn to the pretzel stand and then to the doner stand. With our bellies temporarily full, we headed into the madness of a bus and ferry station on a Monday morning. We went to several wrong ticket booths: one for the buses, one for a tour ferry, a confusing electronic ticket dispenser, and finally found a person to sell us the tokens to get on the ferry across the Bosphorus to European Istanbul. A mere 1.5 Turkish Lira each (about $1). Seated on an upper deck outside, we enjoyed watching as our ferry dodged the innumerable cargo boats headed to and from the Golden Horn of Istanbul. Not a bad price for a cruise from Asia to Europe. TRANSPORT: ferry.
Off the boat into a tram for another 1.5 Turkish Lira each and we were off to Sultanahmet, the touristy area of Istanbul that we both have been to before (Jeff 2 more times than me with friends and family). We got off the tram near the Hagia Sofia and Blue Mosque and walked the rest of the way to our hotel hoping fervently that our room was ready (it was only about noon) so we could take a nap before working on actually getting our tickets to the night's show. Hallelujah! The room was available. And quite nice! A lovely place called the Tashkonak Hotel. Next it was time for a 3-hour nap. TRANSPORT: tram/train, by foot.
Luckily we set an alarm because we were both so exhausted that we passed out completely in our comfy bed at Tashkonak. Our next task was to figure out where to get our tickets. We had already purchased them online, but we'd gotten mixed messages about where we should actually pick them up: the first message said we HAD to get them at the stadium, and the second email said that we could NOT get them at the stadium, but instead had to get them at a Biletix outlet near Taksim Square. Considering that Ataturk Olympic Stadium was generally agreed to be in the middle of nowhere, and our most recent email said go to the Ticketmaster-owned Biletix, we decided to try that first. We walked again to the tram, rode it to the end of the line, and hopped on the nearest (OK, the only) funicular to get to Taksim Square (we love funiculars!). Arriving at insanely-busy Taksim Square we navigated our way out by following the trolley rails to the bookstore that had the Biletix outlet. And a line coming out the door. It was 5:15 PM. Opening band Snow Patrol was supposed to go on stage at 7:30 PM. We did not expect to wait in line here. TRANSPORT: tram/train, by foot, funicular.
I grabbed a spot in the line while Jeff went and asked a bunch of people if this was the right line. Or at least tried. Many people did not speak English, but he was lucky enough to find a group who spoke English that told him they had been in the line for 1.5 hours already! And they weren't even in the door to the bookstore yet! Was the line even moving? This is when we started worrying. Were we going to miss U2?! After all we did to make this happen?! I tried to be optimistic and assumed the people he talked to were just exaggerating. An hour later Jeff went to get us some food. He asked more people and everyone seemed to think we were in the right place. We wondered if we should just get to the stadium and hope our tickets were there, but we decided that since we were already in line and had waited an hour we might as well see it through. Plus the stadium was really far away and we'd really be in trouble if we got there and needed to get our tickets from here. Meanwhile we were trying to figure out how to actually get to the stadium which by some accounts was 2 hours away. After waiting in line for 2.5 miserable hours, we handed over our reservation number only to have the nice man (only one guy running this show) tell us he couldn't help us. We had to go to the stadium.
Both of us almost burst into tears right there. I stormed out and Jeff followed me wondering if I was going to go postal. I was seething! How did it take so damn long for the line to move?! It's a pretty simple process: I want/have a reservation for a ticket. Here's my money/reservation confirmation. Print ticket. Bye bye, have fun at the show! Seriously! How was that line so impossibly slow?! And why were we stupid enough to stay in it all that time? It was 7:30 PM. Snow Patrol was on. Damn. U2 was on in an hour and a half. Double-damn. Could we get to the stadium in time to see this band that I've been dreaming of seeing for over 20 years?! TRANSPORT: none.
I wanted to cry, but I also knew that that wasn't going to help us get to the show. So we speed-walked back to the Square in hopes of getting a taxi. But no one spoke English and no one had any idea where we wanted to go. U2? Really? You haven't heard of the biggest band to ever play a concert in Istanbul? There are posters all over town. Whatever. The subway then. So down, down, down into the bowels of Istanbul. Two stops down the line, then up, up, up to find a bus to Yenibosna where we might be able to find another bus for the concert or maybe could grab a taxi. As we were searching for the right bus, we found a couple of Turkish guys that were also heading to the concert, so we asked if we could latch on to them to make sure we didn't get lost (they admitted to not knowing how to get there either, but at least they spoke Turkish!). The bus slowly got so packed that we couldn't move but we suffered from the smell of humanity for 14 stops to get to Yenibosna. Off the bus we asked our new Turkish "friends" if we could share a taxi with them. And let me tell you, I wish I'd gotten this taxi driver's card, because if I ever need to get anywhere in Istanbul, this guy will get me there. I've never been in a car that had such an aggressive driver. He kept calling someone who was paying attention to the traffic for the concert, so we new there was a nasty traffic jam at the stadium. But that didn't faze this guy. In and out of traffic. Driving down the shoulder. Pushing his way past vehicles 10 times his size. More in and out of traffic. Driving off an exit then back on an on-ramp, just to pass a few cars. Suddenly he decided to go the other direction, then into some side streets. Not really side streets, actually, but a small village. Where was this village in the greater metropolitan Istanbul area? Who knows? Jeff and I had no idea where we were. I guess that was good because I would have started freaking out if I knew he was going AWAY from the stadium. But somehow he wound his way through some neighborhoods and business parks and finally, there it was. The stadium in all its glory. And hardly anyone there! It was after 9 PM and it looked like absolutely nothing was happening in the stadium and that it was barely half-full (is this the right place??). And the friendly Turkish guys didn't even let us pay for part of the taxi ride! TRANSPORT: subway, bus, craziest/best taxi ride ever.
But we still didn't have tickets. This is when we started joking about the amazing race and the title of this post was born. From one person to the next we kept asking "official" looking people where we were supposed to go to pick up our tickets. No, not this booth, you have to go to K section. You should run, they might be closing. We ran. No, not here. Try the next gate. Hmmmm. I'm not sure. OK, I'll let you in here. No, this is not the right place. ARGH! Now I know what it's like to want to pull your hair out. Finally, a nice young man actually walked with us to the correct booth - he even said that no one there really knew what was going on. Truly the organization of this show was pretty dismal. So, at about 9:45 PM we FINALLY had our tickets in hand. Just had to walk half-way around the stadium to get to our seats. And U2 wasn't playing yet, so we didn't miss any of their show. Too bad about Snow Patrol - no bonus points for us. I wanted to see them and this was their last show on the U2 tour. Such is life or "такъв е жхвотът" in Bulgarian. TRANSPORT: by foot - walking and running.
You have to see this stadium to believe it. It looks like either it's still under construction or that it's been left to rot. It looks like it could be a beautiful place for shows, but it is in pretty bad condition. I guess it was finished in 2002 in hopes of winning the bid for the 2008 Olympics, but has been rarely used. It seats almost 80,000 and certainly has the capacity for 100,000 with standing on the floor. But tonight it was only half-full. 50,000 people showed up to see U2, but it seemed so much smaller than that ("only" 50,000, on their first time ever playing in Turkey, with the cheapest tickets on the whole European tour?!?). There were barely any people sitting in our section but there were people sitting in our seats. On any other day I probably would've just sat somewhere else. Not today. Today we went through so much to get those tickets, no one but Jeff and I were going to sit in those two seats. The girl I made move certainly gave me a look like I was an idiot, but how was she to know what a crazy day I had? We made it. TRANSPORT: by foot, with beer in hand.
OMG! U2! LIVE! Need I say more? :) Almost a week later and I'm still thrilled by it. In fact, as Jeff and I were discussing who would write the Beirut blog and who would write the U2 blog, he said something along the lines of, "That smile every time U2 is mentioned means you're doing the U2 blog." I'll put the set list at the end if anyone is interested. OMG! It was awesome! Some of my younger coworkers here who think I'm an old fuddy-duddy since I don't go out that often would not have believed their eyes that I was up til 12:30 AM dancing at a concert. Fantastic! Oh so worth all the difficulties of getting there. TRANSPORT: U2 LIVE! I was in heaven!
Now we had to figure out how to get back to our hotel so we could catch one or two winks before getting on a plane back to Sofia. After the show we just followed the crowds hoping to find a line of taxis or maybe even some of the buses set up for the event. We piled onto a minibus that seats about 12 people but by the time we started rolling had at least 30 people in it. I could only hold on to Jeff while we were tossed around as the bus made turns. It was so tight that no one could possible fall. We were sardines for 20 minutes. At least we didn't pay, because the guy collecting money literally could not reach us. Next we got onto another (bigger, but no less packed) bus towards the main part of the city. Some locals convinced us the trams would still be running, so get off at such and such stop. A few other gullible people got off as well and we all discovered that the trams were not, in fact, running at 1 in the morning. We found a pair of ladies from Slovenia to share a cab with and half an hour or so later we found ourselves a couple of blocks from our hotel. In bed about 1:45 AM. TRANSPORT: by foot, minibus, bus, taxi.
An early morning taxi got us to the airport for our flight to Sofia. Phew. We made it work on Tuesday with but a few hours of sleep, but still buzzing from the concert. What a weekend! I think this past weekend was the closest we have come to anything like the Amazing Race.
Thanks for reading my brain dump. Hope you enjoyed it!
-Shannon
U2 360 Tour
Istanbul/Turkey
6 September 2010
Setlist
Return of the Stingray Guitar
Beautiful Day - Always Forever Now
New Year's Day
Get On Your Boots
Magnificent
Mysterious Ways - My Sweet Lord
Elevation
Until The End Of The World
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
Pride (In the Name of Love)
In A Little While
Miss Sarajevo
City of Blinding Lights
Vertigo
I'll Go Crazy... (remix) - Discotheque - John I'm Only Dancing
Sunday Bloody Sunday - Get Up Stand Up
Mothers of the Disappeared (Bono was joined on stage by Turkish folk singer, Zulfu Livaneli, to sing this song, and then Zulfu, along with help from the crowd sang his own song: Yigidim Aslanim)
Walk On - You'll Never Walk Alone
One
Amazing Grace - Where the Streets Have No Name
Ultraviolet
With or Without You
Moment of Surrender
WELCOME Lebanon! WELCOME!
[For a Flickr slideshow related to this post, please click here (the same one I posted in a previous post.]
Back in July, as my friend Andris and I were climbing Maroon Bells Peak in Colorado, he mentioned "Prairie [his fiance] and I are going to Lebanon in September. You should come visit for the weekend." I thought it was crazy, but couldn't get the idea out of my head. I had just noticed the week before on one of our many flights this summer that there were direct flights from Sofia to Beirut (who knows why?), Shannon and I had both wanted to visit the Middle East, and both Prairie and Andris had lived in the Middle East, so could make good tour guides (Prairie had lived in Beirut itself for a year). Plus Prairie and Shannon hadn't met yet, so that was an extra incentive.
I started poking around into flights, but couldn't find the direct one I thought I'd seen. All the flights required ridiculous connections, and we'd spend almost the whole weekend flying. I forgot about it. Then Andris mentioned he'd seen some direct flights on Bulgarian Air, which for some reason doesn't get picked up by search engines like Kayak.com. Maybe it was possible...
Maybe we also had a 3-day weekend. Maybe we had a 4-day weekend. We weren't sure. The Bulgarian government is notorious for adding extra days to holiday weekends, often with only one or two weeks' notice. Shannon's supervisor told her "I think I heard that that's a 4-day weekend, but I'm not sure." Well hopefully it is. No internet searches about Bulgarian public holidays were helpful, but that's also nothing new here (they would probably be more fruitful in Bulgarian than English). When we worked out a plan to let us see U2 in concert in Istanbul as part of the same trip, Shannon was sold (seeing U2 had been a dream of hers for a few decades now). Sofia --> Beirut --> Istanbul (U2!!!) --> Sofia, and back to work by Tuesday morning. It would be a crazy, expensive outing, but hopefully fun and worth it.
We were nervous. After all, Lebanon is somewhere that Americans are not supposed to go. The US State Department "continues to urge U.S. citizens to avoid all travel to Lebanon due to current safety and security concerns." Well that seems pretty unambiguous. Was this really a good idea? I asked for reassurances from Prairie and Andris, as well as from my former Westridge colleague Sandy, who had gone to high school there and calls Beirut her "favorite city on Earth." All parties were reassuring, and said that while there were risks, the more dangerous areas (such as refugee camps) weren't places I'd have any reason to go as a tourist. Plus the NY Times and various other "serious" papers had called Beirut a hot new tourist destination in the last year or two, so how bad could it be? Still, we were nervous landing, especially as we arrived at 3am (suck) and Andris & Prairie wouldn't get there until 10pm that night.
After a mostly-empty but still crappy Bulgarian Air flight (not a recommended airline), we had arranged an airport pickup from our hostel, so as not to have to deal with buses/taxis in this strange land after midnight. After seemingly driving in circles all over the city, our driver pulled into a random sketchy alley. Please don't let this be the place. Please don't let this be the place. Let this just be a stop for cigarrettes. Oh damn. This is the place.
I'm glad we had a driver from the hostel, because we never would have found Talal Hotel on our own. (Which would have been just as well, in retrospect.) No sign on the street, and a peeling, stained 8.5x11 sheet tacked to the second floor door was the only indication that there was a hotel there. After knocking loudly for several minutes, the manager sleepily stumbled to vertical and let us into our moldy prison cell of a room. One window was 6 feet up and permanently sealed shut. The other window opened into a 1 foot crawl space to another building filled with construction debris. It's just as well, because when I looked out the window in our bathroom later that evening, the view of rooftop refuse was not exactly inspiring. At least the beds were acceptably comfortable, at least until the overly aggressive A/C turned us into little icecubes.
Groggy after a short and poor night's sleep, we set out for the day. It was sunny. Very sunny. And hot (36C/97F). Plenty of traffic too.
We strolled around Martyr's Square, site of many famous rallies and protests, but now full of construction cranes and scary traffic. We walked past the beautiful al-Amin Mosque to a farmer's market in the nearby neighborhood of Saiifi Gardens that had been recommended. We sampled a few items (it was not so different from a farmer's market in the US) then set about finding a real meal. We went to the nightlife district of Gemmayze (in the afternoon) for a Lonely Planet recommended low-key lunch spot called "Le Chef." Highly, highly recommended. Yum. It certainly catered to tourists and ex-pats, but did so in a way that it still felt authentic and local. The menu was all in French (and I wouldn't have known half the words anyway, even in English), but the host helpfully explained the offerings. I got something like the "Egyptian's King's Special" and it was awesome. A bowl of rice with small pieces of beef and chicken, over which I crinkled crunchy thin bread, then poured an amazing bowl of greens (nettles?) and onion/garlic sauce. It was a very unique flavor, and fantastic. I also appreciated the sheer efficiency of the kitchen -- look at the use of space!
The host greeted various newcomers with a hearty WELCOME LEBANON! WELCOME! It seemed like he was giving an order. "Yes sir! I feel welcome!"
After a lunch like that, it was all we could do to struggle back to our crappy hostel room for a siesta. Lucky for us the power went off shortly after we got there, so the A/C went out. That was a very stuffy prison cell with no A/C, but we managed to get some sleep. At some point later while we were trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the day before Andris and Prairie arrived, we heard a loud bang, saw a bright flash, and soon saw smoke pouring out of the other side of our shared "private" bathroom (one room with a 3/4 wall to separate the two loos - the smoke was coming from the other side of the wall...). Yikes! No terrorists, just poor electrical wiring. Apparently when the power came back on the air conditioner in the other room blew a fuse. When I went to the lobby to tell the hostel staff, they were just sitting around and had no idea anything had happened. ("Um, the air conditioner in the other room is on fire...") Lucky for them we were around, otherwise that could have been a much worse situation.
After our naps, we set out for some serious Beirut exploration on foot. We walked a lot...mostly non-stop for about 5 hours. We walked through the newly renovated downtown, through hasn't-even-opened-yet-brand-new "Beirut Souks" mall (home of easily accessible free public toilets!), past countless luxury high-rise apartment buildings under construction, past the bombed out shell of the Holiday Inn, along the lovely waterfront promenade known as the "Corniche," past the swanky American University of Beirut, and back to the hotel in time to meet Andris and Prairie.
Whatever Beirut was in the past ("The Paris of the Middle East," a hellhole of civil war, take your pick), it is now full of two things: luxury apartments, and cranes, building more luxury apartments. From one vantage point in Martyr's Square we counted 17 cranes, working on at least 12 different projects (including one that took you and 12 dining buddies up for an unforgettable "SkyDinner" as the entire dinner table hung 6 stories up). I'm not sure where the money for this comes from, but there is a lot of money flowing into Beirut. Construction is everywhere. The new shopping mall downtown was swanky, full of international brands and high-end labels. At the airport we saw before/after pictures of the downtown, and the recent transformation is incredible. Dozens of city blocks where every single building had been damaged, many reduced to complete rubble from the 15-year civil war, had been completely restored or rebuilt. It looks a little Disney-esque now, it's so shiny and new, but I'd take that over a pile of rubble any day.
Beirut still has signs of a troubled past. The Holiday Inn was opened a few years before the civil war broke out, and had been carefully designed to withstand earthquakes. The high-rise building became a favorite for snipers, and the thoughtful earthquake-proof design also apparently allowed it to withstand mortar shells. There was hand-to-hand fighting in the hotel rooms. It still stands vacant, wind and rain pouring through gaping holes left from the fighting, while brand new luxury apartments and hotels rise all around it. [There are apparently long-running disputes about who now owns the building.] Many other buildings are still falling down and derelict. Some scars are more recent. Prairie showed us stains on seaside cliffs near Pigeon Rocks, leftover from the oil spill that was caused when the Israelis bombed a power station in 2006, causing the largest-ever oil spill in the Mediterranean [The Israelis also prevented international oil response teams from dealing with the oil spill]. There's plenty of razor wire around the Saudi embassy, along with a tank parked out front for good measure (I decided not to take photos of these things...). A few times HumVees full of soldiers with machine guns routinely drove past, but the soldiers seemed more bored than on-edge (one waved at us, unsolicited). Security at the airport is high (you go through security when you walk in the door, then again after you head towards your gate). There are well-armed police, soldiers, and guards in many prominent places. Strolling the grounds of the swish American University of Beirut required leaving our passports at the gate and going through metal detectors. I write all that because it's true, but it's also true that that is not what defines my visit to Beirut.
What defined our visit to Beirut was the terrible ordinariness of it all. Here was a city that reminded me of Los Angeles (though I honestly felt safer walking around Beirut than in many sections of LA). People were just living, doing ordinary things. Walking along the beach. Going to work. Trying to make a buck. Going to dinner. Shopping. Here was a place that as an American we were not supposed to go, but it felt remarkably normal. Here was a place devastated by 15 years of civil war, trying to rebuild, trying to get back to normal. Here was a place shocked by what many considered an unprovoked (or at least a gross over-reaction to Hezbollah nastiness) bombing by Israel in 2006, a massive month-long airstrike that destroyed the Beirut airport, the port, and many roads. Here was a place that had the prime minister assassinated in 2005, right by where I went for a lovely morning run along the seaside. It's hard to put it all together in your head.
Prairie talked about the demonization of the "other" that takes place in both Lebanon and Israel, how all contact between the two nations is restricted (including radio/TV), but how similar the people are across the border from each other. Both nations full of "ladies in pink track suits walking their little dogs." If only they could realize how similar they were.
It's funny...we've traveled a LOT this year, and this is perhaps the most "exotic" destination we've been to yet, but I still keep coming back to the idea that places really aren't that different after all. People aren't that different, anyway. Sure, it's hard to read the road signs in arabic, but so is French or Cyrllic or English, for most of the world. I keep traveling to new places, only to find they remind me a lot of old places.
But I digress...
Saturday night after we met up with Andris and Prairie we enjoyed a few drinks in Gemmayze and watched insane people bike down a many-level set of outdoor stairs for a Red Bull-sponsored event. Awesome. ("Drink Red Bull, and you'll do stupid, dangerous things!") We were all pretty tired from our day, so we particularly enjoyed the best feature of our crappy hostel: the after-hours night-club in the basement. What's that, you say? An after-hours night-club? What's that? That's one that opens after the regular ones close, in case you didn't get the hint that it was time to sober up and go to bed. It ran from 3am to 10am. TEN IN THE MORNING! The earplugs I wore did little to stop the thumping bass that was reverberating through the building walls all morning. Doom-Doom-Boom-Doom. Doom-Doom-Boom-Doom. Why is it light out? Doom-Doom-Boom-Doom? Where is that coming from? Doom-Doom-Boom-Doom. By 8:30 am I couldn't pretend to sleep any more, and got up to run. By our front door I saw a lady all dressed up for the club in tight pink sluttiness, waiting for a ride. Let me tell you, that outfit is a lot less hot in the bright glare of the morning sun. (Which is why you should GO HOME before the sun rises.) For future reference, I will avoid hotels that have a really nice website with lovely photos of the country, but no photos of the actual rooms (there was a definite reason for that!). Lonely Planet recommended Talal, but maybe it was under a different owner, or maybe it was pre-night-club. We ended up changing to a different hostel across the street, the Al-Nazih Pension, that was much, much nicer, despite the circuit breaker on the A/C that kept flipping off, causing us to slowly suffocate at 2 in the morning, until we repeatedly woke up the manager to fix it (which he thankfully eventually did).
On Sunday, Andris, Prairie, Shannon and I had much transit luck in getting out of town to visit Jeita Grotto, a fabulous cave complex that is rather openly self-promoting itself as one of the "7 new natural wonders of the world." While I don't honestly think it really rivals the Grand Canyon or the Galapagos, it was really cool, and probably the most impressive "tourist" cave I've been in (where there are walkways and installed lights). It has a HUGE upper cavern, entirely full of stalactites and stalagmites (and annoying French ladies trying to tell you how to remember the difference with a mnemnonic that does not translate well from French). It was impressive (The 7 new wonders link above has some nice photos). Even more awesome was the smaller lower cavern, where you got to take a short electric boat ride on the underground lake to view the cave. Very cool. I wish I could share photos here, but for some inexplicable reason, photography was expressly forbidden, to the point where they had little lockers at the entrance where you were supposed to store your camera and they said they would confiscate any film/memory cards of violators. I don't really see the point of this, especially as there wasn't a particularly impressive selection of "official" postcards/photos/posters or anything to buy at the gift shop. Maybe all the flashes were a safety hazard or something. At any rate, I don't have pictures, but it was cool. It is certainly a recommended 1/2 day trip from Beirut.
Speaking of transit luck: you don't "pick up" taxis or buses in Lebanon. They pick up you. Seriously. If you're walking anywhere near the street, every taxi (and many, many more cars that are informal taxis) will honk at you, letting you know that you can get a ride. Sometimes they hassle you too - honking incessantly, slowing down and stopping next to you, even yelling at you to get in. Does this actually work for some people? "Oh, well I was enjoying this walk, but since you yelled at me, I guess I'll get into your piece-of-crap car and pay you to hopefully take me somewhere I'm going, and not kidnap me or triple-charge me or something." It got pretty annoying. As a pedestrian in many non-pedestrian-friendly places, I am used to looking at a car when they honk at me, to see if I am about to meet the blunt end of a speeding Mercedes, but making eye-contact only encouraged them, so I had to start ignoring as blatantly as possible all the honking at me. The buses too...we only had to walk within 2 blocks of the supposed bus station before a bus slowed down, yelled at us, and when we tried to wave him away, he really stopped and convinced Prairie (the only one of us to speak any Arabic) that he was going in the general direction we wanted to go, or at least would go that way now if he picked up these 4 sucker passengers. It was really easy to get on a bus, although the random spot next to the highway outside of town where he dropped us off wasn't really where we wanted to be, so we walked a while on a frontage road until a minibus honked at us and convinced us to get in, driving completely out of his planned route because we were paying more than the other passengers, apparently. It was interesting, and I'm sure glad we had Prairie with us to help navigate.
Back in Beirut that afternoon, we toured the swanky campus of the American University of Beirut, where "Jewett Hall" is a women's dormitory. Seriously. It's supposed to be one of the best universities in the Middle East, and it has a lovely sea-side campus that reminded me of UC Santa Barbara (but with a bit more razor wire). We then walked along the waterfront Corniche to Pigeon Rocks, a lovely rock outcropping just offshore. Though Shannon was self-conscious about swimming in a Muslim region with a bunch of males around (and no females swimming except one or two fully-covered), we wanted to take a dip in the Mediterranean. We timed it just for sunset. The water was really warm, and bracingly, eye-stingingly salty (much, much saltier than the Black Sea). We treaded water while we watched the sun dip into the western horizon...very, very nice. Later on we enjoyed an expensive but leisurely dinner at a seaside restaurant, all before getting up at 4:30 am to catch our next flight. Onward to Istanbul, onward to U2!
It was a quick but memorable and informative visit. Lots to think about, lots to remember. GOODBYE LEBANON! GOODBYE!
Back in July, as my friend Andris and I were climbing Maroon Bells Peak in Colorado, he mentioned "Prairie [his fiance] and I are going to Lebanon in September. You should come visit for the weekend." I thought it was crazy, but couldn't get the idea out of my head. I had just noticed the week before on one of our many flights this summer that there were direct flights from Sofia to Beirut (who knows why?), Shannon and I had both wanted to visit the Middle East, and both Prairie and Andris had lived in the Middle East, so could make good tour guides (Prairie had lived in Beirut itself for a year). Plus Prairie and Shannon hadn't met yet, so that was an extra incentive.
I started poking around into flights, but couldn't find the direct one I thought I'd seen. All the flights required ridiculous connections, and we'd spend almost the whole weekend flying. I forgot about it. Then Andris mentioned he'd seen some direct flights on Bulgarian Air, which for some reason doesn't get picked up by search engines like Kayak.com. Maybe it was possible...
Maybe we also had a 3-day weekend. Maybe we had a 4-day weekend. We weren't sure. The Bulgarian government is notorious for adding extra days to holiday weekends, often with only one or two weeks' notice. Shannon's supervisor told her "I think I heard that that's a 4-day weekend, but I'm not sure." Well hopefully it is. No internet searches about Bulgarian public holidays were helpful, but that's also nothing new here (they would probably be more fruitful in Bulgarian than English). When we worked out a plan to let us see U2 in concert in Istanbul as part of the same trip, Shannon was sold (seeing U2 had been a dream of hers for a few decades now). Sofia --> Beirut --> Istanbul (U2!!!) --> Sofia, and back to work by Tuesday morning. It would be a crazy, expensive outing, but hopefully fun and worth it.
We were nervous. After all, Lebanon is somewhere that Americans are not supposed to go. The US State Department "continues to urge U.S. citizens to avoid all travel to Lebanon due to current safety and security concerns." Well that seems pretty unambiguous. Was this really a good idea? I asked for reassurances from Prairie and Andris, as well as from my former Westridge colleague Sandy, who had gone to high school there and calls Beirut her "favorite city on Earth." All parties were reassuring, and said that while there were risks, the more dangerous areas (such as refugee camps) weren't places I'd have any reason to go as a tourist. Plus the NY Times and various other "serious" papers had called Beirut a hot new tourist destination in the last year or two, so how bad could it be? Still, we were nervous landing, especially as we arrived at 3am (suck) and Andris & Prairie wouldn't get there until 10pm that night.
After a mostly-empty but still crappy Bulgarian Air flight (not a recommended airline), we had arranged an airport pickup from our hostel, so as not to have to deal with buses/taxis in this strange land after midnight. After seemingly driving in circles all over the city, our driver pulled into a random sketchy alley. Please don't let this be the place. Please don't let this be the place. Let this just be a stop for cigarrettes. Oh damn. This is the place.
I'm glad we had a driver from the hostel, because we never would have found Talal Hotel on our own. (Which would have been just as well, in retrospect.) No sign on the street, and a peeling, stained 8.5x11 sheet tacked to the second floor door was the only indication that there was a hotel there. After knocking loudly for several minutes, the manager sleepily stumbled to vertical and let us into our moldy prison cell of a room. One window was 6 feet up and permanently sealed shut. The other window opened into a 1 foot crawl space to another building filled with construction debris. It's just as well, because when I looked out the window in our bathroom later that evening, the view of rooftop refuse was not exactly inspiring. At least the beds were acceptably comfortable, at least until the overly aggressive A/C turned us into little icecubes.
Groggy after a short and poor night's sleep, we set out for the day. It was sunny. Very sunny. And hot (36C/97F). Plenty of traffic too.
We strolled around Martyr's Square, site of many famous rallies and protests, but now full of construction cranes and scary traffic. We walked past the beautiful al-Amin Mosque to a farmer's market in the nearby neighborhood of Saiifi Gardens that had been recommended. We sampled a few items (it was not so different from a farmer's market in the US) then set about finding a real meal. We went to the nightlife district of Gemmayze (in the afternoon) for a Lonely Planet recommended low-key lunch spot called "Le Chef." Highly, highly recommended. Yum. It certainly catered to tourists and ex-pats, but did so in a way that it still felt authentic and local. The menu was all in French (and I wouldn't have known half the words anyway, even in English), but the host helpfully explained the offerings. I got something like the "Egyptian's King's Special" and it was awesome. A bowl of rice with small pieces of beef and chicken, over which I crinkled crunchy thin bread, then poured an amazing bowl of greens (nettles?) and onion/garlic sauce. It was a very unique flavor, and fantastic. I also appreciated the sheer efficiency of the kitchen -- look at the use of space!
The host greeted various newcomers with a hearty WELCOME LEBANON! WELCOME! It seemed like he was giving an order. "Yes sir! I feel welcome!"
After a lunch like that, it was all we could do to struggle back to our crappy hostel room for a siesta. Lucky for us the power went off shortly after we got there, so the A/C went out. That was a very stuffy prison cell with no A/C, but we managed to get some sleep. At some point later while we were trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the day before Andris and Prairie arrived, we heard a loud bang, saw a bright flash, and soon saw smoke pouring out of the other side of our shared "private" bathroom (one room with a 3/4 wall to separate the two loos - the smoke was coming from the other side of the wall...). Yikes! No terrorists, just poor electrical wiring. Apparently when the power came back on the air conditioner in the other room blew a fuse. When I went to the lobby to tell the hostel staff, they were just sitting around and had no idea anything had happened. ("Um, the air conditioner in the other room is on fire...") Lucky for them we were around, otherwise that could have been a much worse situation.
After our naps, we set out for some serious Beirut exploration on foot. We walked a lot...mostly non-stop for about 5 hours. We walked through the newly renovated downtown, through hasn't-even-opened-yet-brand-new "Beirut Souks" mall (home of easily accessible free public toilets!), past countless luxury high-rise apartment buildings under construction, past the bombed out shell of the Holiday Inn, along the lovely waterfront promenade known as the "Corniche," past the swanky American University of Beirut, and back to the hotel in time to meet Andris and Prairie.
Whatever Beirut was in the past ("The Paris of the Middle East," a hellhole of civil war, take your pick), it is now full of two things: luxury apartments, and cranes, building more luxury apartments. From one vantage point in Martyr's Square we counted 17 cranes, working on at least 12 different projects (including one that took you and 12 dining buddies up for an unforgettable "SkyDinner" as the entire dinner table hung 6 stories up). I'm not sure where the money for this comes from, but there is a lot of money flowing into Beirut. Construction is everywhere. The new shopping mall downtown was swanky, full of international brands and high-end labels. At the airport we saw before/after pictures of the downtown, and the recent transformation is incredible. Dozens of city blocks where every single building had been damaged, many reduced to complete rubble from the 15-year civil war, had been completely restored or rebuilt. It looks a little Disney-esque now, it's so shiny and new, but I'd take that over a pile of rubble any day.
Beirut still has signs of a troubled past. The Holiday Inn was opened a few years before the civil war broke out, and had been carefully designed to withstand earthquakes. The high-rise building became a favorite for snipers, and the thoughtful earthquake-proof design also apparently allowed it to withstand mortar shells. There was hand-to-hand fighting in the hotel rooms. It still stands vacant, wind and rain pouring through gaping holes left from the fighting, while brand new luxury apartments and hotels rise all around it. [There are apparently long-running disputes about who now owns the building.] Many other buildings are still falling down and derelict. Some scars are more recent. Prairie showed us stains on seaside cliffs near Pigeon Rocks, leftover from the oil spill that was caused when the Israelis bombed a power station in 2006, causing the largest-ever oil spill in the Mediterranean [The Israelis also prevented international oil response teams from dealing with the oil spill]. There's plenty of razor wire around the Saudi embassy, along with a tank parked out front for good measure (I decided not to take photos of these things...). A few times HumVees full of soldiers with machine guns routinely drove past, but the soldiers seemed more bored than on-edge (one waved at us, unsolicited). Security at the airport is high (you go through security when you walk in the door, then again after you head towards your gate). There are well-armed police, soldiers, and guards in many prominent places. Strolling the grounds of the swish American University of Beirut required leaving our passports at the gate and going through metal detectors. I write all that because it's true, but it's also true that that is not what defines my visit to Beirut.
What defined our visit to Beirut was the terrible ordinariness of it all. Here was a city that reminded me of Los Angeles (though I honestly felt safer walking around Beirut than in many sections of LA). People were just living, doing ordinary things. Walking along the beach. Going to work. Trying to make a buck. Going to dinner. Shopping. Here was a place that as an American we were not supposed to go, but it felt remarkably normal. Here was a place devastated by 15 years of civil war, trying to rebuild, trying to get back to normal. Here was a place shocked by what many considered an unprovoked (or at least a gross over-reaction to Hezbollah nastiness) bombing by Israel in 2006, a massive month-long airstrike that destroyed the Beirut airport, the port, and many roads. Here was a place that had the prime minister assassinated in 2005, right by where I went for a lovely morning run along the seaside. It's hard to put it all together in your head.
Prairie talked about the demonization of the "other" that takes place in both Lebanon and Israel, how all contact between the two nations is restricted (including radio/TV), but how similar the people are across the border from each other. Both nations full of "ladies in pink track suits walking their little dogs." If only they could realize how similar they were.
It's funny...we've traveled a LOT this year, and this is perhaps the most "exotic" destination we've been to yet, but I still keep coming back to the idea that places really aren't that different after all. People aren't that different, anyway. Sure, it's hard to read the road signs in arabic, but so is French or Cyrllic or English, for most of the world. I keep traveling to new places, only to find they remind me a lot of old places.
But I digress...
Saturday night after we met up with Andris and Prairie we enjoyed a few drinks in Gemmayze and watched insane people bike down a many-level set of outdoor stairs for a Red Bull-sponsored event. Awesome. ("Drink Red Bull, and you'll do stupid, dangerous things!") We were all pretty tired from our day, so we particularly enjoyed the best feature of our crappy hostel: the after-hours night-club in the basement. What's that, you say? An after-hours night-club? What's that? That's one that opens after the regular ones close, in case you didn't get the hint that it was time to sober up and go to bed. It ran from 3am to 10am. TEN IN THE MORNING! The earplugs I wore did little to stop the thumping bass that was reverberating through the building walls all morning. Doom-Doom-Boom-Doom. Doom-Doom-Boom-Doom. Why is it light out? Doom-Doom-Boom-Doom? Where is that coming from? Doom-Doom-Boom-Doom. By 8:30 am I couldn't pretend to sleep any more, and got up to run. By our front door I saw a lady all dressed up for the club in tight pink sluttiness, waiting for a ride. Let me tell you, that outfit is a lot less hot in the bright glare of the morning sun. (Which is why you should GO HOME before the sun rises.) For future reference, I will avoid hotels that have a really nice website with lovely photos of the country, but no photos of the actual rooms (there was a definite reason for that!). Lonely Planet recommended Talal, but maybe it was under a different owner, or maybe it was pre-night-club. We ended up changing to a different hostel across the street, the Al-Nazih Pension, that was much, much nicer, despite the circuit breaker on the A/C that kept flipping off, causing us to slowly suffocate at 2 in the morning, until we repeatedly woke up the manager to fix it (which he thankfully eventually did).
On Sunday, Andris, Prairie, Shannon and I had much transit luck in getting out of town to visit Jeita Grotto, a fabulous cave complex that is rather openly self-promoting itself as one of the "7 new natural wonders of the world." While I don't honestly think it really rivals the Grand Canyon or the Galapagos, it was really cool, and probably the most impressive "tourist" cave I've been in (where there are walkways and installed lights). It has a HUGE upper cavern, entirely full of stalactites and stalagmites (and annoying French ladies trying to tell you how to remember the difference with a mnemnonic that does not translate well from French). It was impressive (The 7 new wonders link above has some nice photos). Even more awesome was the smaller lower cavern, where you got to take a short electric boat ride on the underground lake to view the cave. Very cool. I wish I could share photos here, but for some inexplicable reason, photography was expressly forbidden, to the point where they had little lockers at the entrance where you were supposed to store your camera and they said they would confiscate any film/memory cards of violators. I don't really see the point of this, especially as there wasn't a particularly impressive selection of "official" postcards/photos/posters or anything to buy at the gift shop. Maybe all the flashes were a safety hazard or something. At any rate, I don't have pictures, but it was cool. It is certainly a recommended 1/2 day trip from Beirut.
Speaking of transit luck: you don't "pick up" taxis or buses in Lebanon. They pick up you. Seriously. If you're walking anywhere near the street, every taxi (and many, many more cars that are informal taxis) will honk at you, letting you know that you can get a ride. Sometimes they hassle you too - honking incessantly, slowing down and stopping next to you, even yelling at you to get in. Does this actually work for some people? "Oh, well I was enjoying this walk, but since you yelled at me, I guess I'll get into your piece-of-crap car and pay you to hopefully take me somewhere I'm going, and not kidnap me or triple-charge me or something." It got pretty annoying. As a pedestrian in many non-pedestrian-friendly places, I am used to looking at a car when they honk at me, to see if I am about to meet the blunt end of a speeding Mercedes, but making eye-contact only encouraged them, so I had to start ignoring as blatantly as possible all the honking at me. The buses too...we only had to walk within 2 blocks of the supposed bus station before a bus slowed down, yelled at us, and when we tried to wave him away, he really stopped and convinced Prairie (the only one of us to speak any Arabic) that he was going in the general direction we wanted to go, or at least would go that way now if he picked up these 4 sucker passengers. It was really easy to get on a bus, although the random spot next to the highway outside of town where he dropped us off wasn't really where we wanted to be, so we walked a while on a frontage road until a minibus honked at us and convinced us to get in, driving completely out of his planned route because we were paying more than the other passengers, apparently. It was interesting, and I'm sure glad we had Prairie with us to help navigate.
Back in Beirut that afternoon, we toured the swanky campus of the American University of Beirut, where "Jewett Hall" is a women's dormitory. Seriously. It's supposed to be one of the best universities in the Middle East, and it has a lovely sea-side campus that reminded me of UC Santa Barbara (but with a bit more razor wire). We then walked along the waterfront Corniche to Pigeon Rocks, a lovely rock outcropping just offshore. Though Shannon was self-conscious about swimming in a Muslim region with a bunch of males around (and no females swimming except one or two fully-covered), we wanted to take a dip in the Mediterranean. We timed it just for sunset. The water was really warm, and bracingly, eye-stingingly salty (much, much saltier than the Black Sea). We treaded water while we watched the sun dip into the western horizon...very, very nice. Later on we enjoyed an expensive but leisurely dinner at a seaside restaurant, all before getting up at 4:30 am to catch our next flight. Onward to Istanbul, onward to U2!
It was a quick but memorable and informative visit. Lots to think about, lots to remember. GOODBYE LEBANON! GOODBYE!
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Photos from Beirut
We just took a crazy, crazy long-weekend trip to Beirut, Lebanon, then Istanbul, Turkey. In Beirut we had a chance to meet up with our friends Prairie and Andris (who live in San Francisco, but are vacationing for 2 weeks in Lebanon) and get a taste of the Middle East from people who have lived there a little bit (Prairie in Beirut and Jordan, Andris in Jordan). We'll post some stories later, but here is a slideshow on Flickr.
To properly view the slideshow, press the button on the lower right that has four outward-facing arrows to get the photos full-screen. Then click the "show info" button on the upper right of the slideshow to get explantory titles & captions. I suggest the "slow" speed setting on the slideshow (under "options") to have enough time to read the captions. I'm trying this embedding of a Flickr slideshow instead of manually loading all the photos into the blog, because it's both faster and allows full-screen images. Let me know if it works for you.
To properly view the slideshow, press the button on the lower right that has four outward-facing arrows to get the photos full-screen. Then click the "show info" button on the upper right of the slideshow to get explantory titles & captions. I suggest the "slow" speed setting on the slideshow (under "options") to have enough time to read the captions. I'm trying this embedding of a Flickr slideshow instead of manually loading all the photos into the blog, because it's both faster and allows full-screen images. Let me know if it works for you.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Bulgaria Year 1 in Review
It's been a year since we moved to Bulgaria.
We've traveled many places and made wonderful new friends (and we've already even had to say goodbye to some of them). We've worked harder than we thought we could: I discovered that teaching in a new place with a new book and curriculum was more like being a first-year teacher than a veteran, and Shannon overcame her personal fear/terror/difficulties/loathing... of teaching, confrontations, and taking authority.
We yelled at the sky and shook our tiny fists at the roadblocks and frustrations Bulgaria (and living abroad in general) threw at us. Sometimes we wanted to buy something that would be so simple in the US (just a quick trip to Target or Wal-Mart), but we didn't know if it was for sale at all, if it was for sale where it would be, how to ask anyone to help, or even how to get there.
We dealt with the surprisingly difficult loss of independence that came from losing a car, bikes, phones, knowledge of how everything works, and the ability to communicate. I sometimes felt like an infant throwing a tantrum - I couldn't express the difference between whether I had a poopy diaper or was just hungry, so I'd just get upset about it either way. Waaaaaaa! I couldn't say anything in Bulgarian, and lots of times just that knowledge prevented me from even trying in English (which many Bulgarians speak well).
We did things and went places that we had to keep pinching ourselves were really happening to us. It sometimes felt so normal, hanging out at a coffeeshop in London or on a rooftop terrace in Istanbul, or even grading papers at Starbucks (in BULGARIA!) that I sometimes couldn't decide whether to be amazed by it all (I'm in BULGARIA!) or underwhelmed by the ordinariness of it.
When we went back to the USA this summer, I had a hard time responding to the obvious question of "How's Bulgaria?" I don't know. Amazing. Wonderful. Frustrating. Maddening. Lots of work. Lots of fun. Exhausting. Beautiful. Ugly. Exciting.
We had some tough times this year. I hope not to have to repeat anything like the month of May again, where we spent half the time in hospital for a variety of awful things. But even in May, in the midst of many bad times, we still managed to fit in a long weekend to Prague and a road-trip around Bulgaria for a friend's wedding.
"May you live in interesting times," as the saying (sometimes called a curse) goes. We certainly do. Whatever life in Bulgaria has been, it has always been interesting. Sometimes interesting-awesome, sometimes interesting-weird, sometimes interesting-sucky. Hopefully down the road even the interesting-sucky will just mellow out into a good story to tell.
For you Harper's Index fans out there, here's a recap by the numbers:
Countries we've visited this year: 16
Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Macedonia, Albania, Morocco (just Shannon), Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia, Norway, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, USA, Germany
Seas swam in (collectively): 4
Atlantic Ocean, Black Sea, Adriatic Sea, Aegean Sea
Mountains climbed (collectively):
Maroon Bells Peak (Colorado, 4315 m/14,156 ft), Cherni Vrah / Vitosha (Bulgaria, 2290 m / 7,513 ft)
(hmmm...will need to get more peaks in next year!)
Students taught
293
Care packages received
6 (THANKS!)
Power Outages
Innumerable
Laptop Deaths
2
International Visitors
7 (Heather, Bajji, Spike, Tom S, Dad, Scott, Paul)
Medical procedures requiring overnight hospitalization
2
Cipro (super-strength antibiotics) prescriptions given
6
Furthest North we traveled
61'44 (Jostedal, Norway)
Countries we already have plane tickets to visit in September:
3
(tee hee)
Here is a short video from our postcard wall. There are postcards from some places that we had wonderful wonderful trips (like Istanbul, and Lake Como) that we somehow never quite got a chance to do a blog post about. Maybe there will still be some "blast-from-the-past" make-up blog posts, if new adventures don't take up too much time.
We have often thought how much more difficult this year would have been without the support we received from friends and family around the world. (Thanks to the easy communication provided by Skype, Facebook, this blog, email, and the internet in general-- it's so much easier to stay connected to those we love on different continents than it would have been 10 or 20 years ago.)
Thanks to all who read our blog (especially when you make comments!), gave us phone calls, sent emails, sent birthday cards, sent care packages (you are our true heroes!) and just generally kept us in your thoughts.
Until next time...
Jeff
We've traveled many places and made wonderful new friends (and we've already even had to say goodbye to some of them). We've worked harder than we thought we could: I discovered that teaching in a new place with a new book and curriculum was more like being a first-year teacher than a veteran, and Shannon overcame her personal fear/terror/difficulties/loathing... of teaching, confrontations, and taking authority.
We yelled at the sky and shook our tiny fists at the roadblocks and frustrations Bulgaria (and living abroad in general) threw at us. Sometimes we wanted to buy something that would be so simple in the US (just a quick trip to Target or Wal-Mart), but we didn't know if it was for sale at all, if it was for sale where it would be, how to ask anyone to help, or even how to get there.
We dealt with the surprisingly difficult loss of independence that came from losing a car, bikes, phones, knowledge of how everything works, and the ability to communicate. I sometimes felt like an infant throwing a tantrum - I couldn't express the difference between whether I had a poopy diaper or was just hungry, so I'd just get upset about it either way. Waaaaaaa! I couldn't say anything in Bulgarian, and lots of times just that knowledge prevented me from even trying in English (which many Bulgarians speak well).
We did things and went places that we had to keep pinching ourselves were really happening to us. It sometimes felt so normal, hanging out at a coffeeshop in London or on a rooftop terrace in Istanbul, or even grading papers at Starbucks (in BULGARIA!) that I sometimes couldn't decide whether to be amazed by it all (I'm in BULGARIA!) or underwhelmed by the ordinariness of it.
When we went back to the USA this summer, I had a hard time responding to the obvious question of "How's Bulgaria?" I don't know. Amazing. Wonderful. Frustrating. Maddening. Lots of work. Lots of fun. Exhausting. Beautiful. Ugly. Exciting.
We had some tough times this year. I hope not to have to repeat anything like the month of May again, where we spent half the time in hospital for a variety of awful things. But even in May, in the midst of many bad times, we still managed to fit in a long weekend to Prague and a road-trip around Bulgaria for a friend's wedding.
"May you live in interesting times," as the saying (sometimes called a curse) goes. We certainly do. Whatever life in Bulgaria has been, it has always been interesting. Sometimes interesting-awesome, sometimes interesting-weird, sometimes interesting-sucky. Hopefully down the road even the interesting-sucky will just mellow out into a good story to tell.
For you Harper's Index fans out there, here's a recap by the numbers:
Countries we've visited this year: 16
Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Macedonia, Albania, Morocco (just Shannon), Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia, Norway, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Italy, Austria, USA, Germany
(We only drove through Serbia and Macedonia, without spending much time, and we also got passport stamps from Germany and France, but haven't really seen too much more of these countries than the airports, although we did it make into Frankfurt for a beer by the river on a hot day during a long layover, so maybe that one does count after all.)
Seas swam in (collectively): 4
Atlantic Ocean, Black Sea, Adriatic Sea, Aegean Sea
Mountains climbed (collectively):
Maroon Bells Peak (Colorado, 4315 m/14,156 ft), Cherni Vrah / Vitosha (Bulgaria, 2290 m / 7,513 ft)
(hmmm...will need to get more peaks in next year!)
Students taught
293
Care packages received
6 (THANKS!)
Power Outages
Innumerable
Laptop Deaths
2
International Visitors
7 (Heather, Bajji, Spike, Tom S, Dad, Scott, Paul)
Medical procedures requiring overnight hospitalization
2
Cipro (super-strength antibiotics) prescriptions given
6
Furthest North we traveled
61'44 (Jostedal, Norway)
Countries we already have plane tickets to visit in September:
3
(tee hee)
Here is a short video from our postcard wall. There are postcards from some places that we had wonderful wonderful trips (like Istanbul, and Lake Como) that we somehow never quite got a chance to do a blog post about. Maybe there will still be some "blast-from-the-past" make-up blog posts, if new adventures don't take up too much time.
We have often thought how much more difficult this year would have been without the support we received from friends and family around the world. (Thanks to the easy communication provided by Skype, Facebook, this blog, email, and the internet in general-- it's so much easier to stay connected to those we love on different continents than it would have been 10 or 20 years ago.)
Thanks to all who read our blog (especially when you make comments!), gave us phone calls, sent emails, sent birthday cards, sent care packages (you are our true heroes!) and just generally kept us in your thoughts.
Until next time...
Jeff
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Taxi Driver #2
So when we first arrived in Bulgaria Jeff wrote a funny post about a somewhat crazy taxi driver we had one evening entitled, "Taxi Driver #1." We expected to have many more taxi drivers to talk about but for the most part all the drivers we've had have been courteous and friendly. Until this evening.
Margaret, a friend of my coworker, Lindsay, arrived in Sofia tonight and seeing as how I was the only international staff on campus, I went to greet her at the gate (you have to have a gate pass to get in and she doesn't have one yet). Lindsay will be arriving later tonight.
Anyway, when the taxi pulled up to the gate I expected Margaret to pay, jump out, get her bags, and we would be on our way back onto campus. But instead it looked like she and the taxi driver were arguing. Did she forget to get leva at the airport? Did she not have enough? Finally, she stepped out of the car and said, "Are you Shannon? I'm Margaret. He's charging me 37 lv for this ride and I don't have enough money." I was dumbfounded! It costs no more than 8 lv to get from the airport to campus. This is when I realized that this was not OK Taxi (the reliable and trustworthy company that we always use). And according to the sign on his window, he charges 4.99 lv for every km. This is absurd!
So we argued with him - me saying it should only be 8 lv, Margaret saying she would pay 15 lv if he would just give her bags to her (they were in the trunk), him saying it's his company and that's what he charges and he would call the police. He wouldn't budge. Grr. I hadn't brought any cash with me to meet her, so she finally convinced him that if he would take her to an ATM she would pay 30 lv. What a rip off! So off they went.
When they got back about 10 minutes later she got out of the car and said, "I'm really sorry to do this to you Shannon, but the ATM wouldn't take my card, so can I borrow 10 lv?" Poor thing! What a terrible welcome to this country (although she had been here before). So I ran back to my house, grabbed some cash, and ran back to Margaret and the taxi driver (probably took me more than 5 minutes - it's a bit of a distance from the gate). I gave her a ten, she had 15, the driver demanded 30 and finally accepted the 2 American dollars she had in her wallet. We both told him how rude this was, what a rip-off it was, how if he had just accepted the 15 in the first place he could have gotten other fairs already, and finally, how he made an incredibly poor welcome to foreigners here. His response was, "It's not my problem." Jackass.
The sad thing about this is that Margaret was well-prepared for this. Lindsay had given her enough cash for a snack and a cab ride from the airport. She had instructed her to only take OK Taxi and to beware of impostors. Margaret even asked the person helping her to the taxi if it was OK Taxi and he said yes. The truth was that the O in OK had a slash in it and they were called Softrans instead of Supertrans (in Cyrillic of course: софтранс vs. супертранс - how is someone who doesn't read Cyrillic supposed to tell the difference?!?). In fact, their phone number was off by only one digit from OK's phone number. So having only been here once before, having been told this was OK Taxi, and, I suppose, believing that people are inherently good, Margaret got in and didn't think to look at the price. And paid a price for the corruption that is so common in this country.
So, to finish this story, we love OK Taxi and really hate those nasty impostors. Here is a good description of how to tell the real OK Taxi from the fake ones (especially at the airport) by our friend Carolyn http://karolinkabulgaria.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/yeah-o-k-taxi/. This will be especially useful to anyone who might be traveling here.
We'd heard about this sort of bad experience with the taxis here, but until this evening had not had the pleasure of actually having one of these experiences.
Welcome to Bulgaria, Margaret. I hope the rest of your stay is much more pleasant.
Margaret, a friend of my coworker, Lindsay, arrived in Sofia tonight and seeing as how I was the only international staff on campus, I went to greet her at the gate (you have to have a gate pass to get in and she doesn't have one yet). Lindsay will be arriving later tonight.
Anyway, when the taxi pulled up to the gate I expected Margaret to pay, jump out, get her bags, and we would be on our way back onto campus. But instead it looked like she and the taxi driver were arguing. Did she forget to get leva at the airport? Did she not have enough? Finally, she stepped out of the car and said, "Are you Shannon? I'm Margaret. He's charging me 37 lv for this ride and I don't have enough money." I was dumbfounded! It costs no more than 8 lv to get from the airport to campus. This is when I realized that this was not OK Taxi (the reliable and trustworthy company that we always use). And according to the sign on his window, he charges 4.99 lv for every km. This is absurd!
So we argued with him - me saying it should only be 8 lv, Margaret saying she would pay 15 lv if he would just give her bags to her (they were in the trunk), him saying it's his company and that's what he charges and he would call the police. He wouldn't budge. Grr. I hadn't brought any cash with me to meet her, so she finally convinced him that if he would take her to an ATM she would pay 30 lv. What a rip off! So off they went.
When they got back about 10 minutes later she got out of the car and said, "I'm really sorry to do this to you Shannon, but the ATM wouldn't take my card, so can I borrow 10 lv?" Poor thing! What a terrible welcome to this country (although she had been here before). So I ran back to my house, grabbed some cash, and ran back to Margaret and the taxi driver (probably took me more than 5 minutes - it's a bit of a distance from the gate). I gave her a ten, she had 15, the driver demanded 30 and finally accepted the 2 American dollars she had in her wallet. We both told him how rude this was, what a rip-off it was, how if he had just accepted the 15 in the first place he could have gotten other fairs already, and finally, how he made an incredibly poor welcome to foreigners here. His response was, "It's not my problem." Jackass.
The sad thing about this is that Margaret was well-prepared for this. Lindsay had given her enough cash for a snack and a cab ride from the airport. She had instructed her to only take OK Taxi and to beware of impostors. Margaret even asked the person helping her to the taxi if it was OK Taxi and he said yes. The truth was that the O in OK had a slash in it and they were called Softrans instead of Supertrans (in Cyrillic of course: софтранс vs. супертранс - how is someone who doesn't read Cyrillic supposed to tell the difference?!?). In fact, their phone number was off by only one digit from OK's phone number. So having only been here once before, having been told this was OK Taxi, and, I suppose, believing that people are inherently good, Margaret got in and didn't think to look at the price. And paid a price for the corruption that is so common in this country.
So, to finish this story, we love OK Taxi and really hate those nasty impostors. Here is a good description of how to tell the real OK Taxi from the fake ones (especially at the airport) by our friend Carolyn http://karolinkabulgaria.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/yeah-o-k-taxi/. This will be especially useful to anyone who might be traveling here.
We'd heard about this sort of bad experience with the taxis here, but until this evening had not had the pleasure of actually having one of these experiences.
Welcome to Bulgaria, Margaret. I hope the rest of your stay is much more pleasant.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
WeGo Yugo Part 1: хаиде ("Hai-day").
It's been over a month since we posted, and we've had lots of great adventures, including a short trip to Norway and visiting friends and family in Colorado and Michigan. I've also got pictures from Prague saved up, as well as a "Best of Bulgaria, Year 1" picture show to post. All in due time (or overdue time). Right now it's more important to blog while the experiences are fresh. And right now what's fresh is Albania.
Back when we found out we were heading to Bulgaria, we raided the local Bozeman Public Library for anything Bulgaria-related. Not surprisingly, that wasn't very much, and a lot of that only mentioned Bulgaria peripherally. Much of what I could find on the region focused on the former Yugoslavia. Intrigued, we planned to visit as soon as we could.
Last summer, I thought we'd head to Croatia. It's supposed to have a beautiful coastline, and it's really not that far (less than 300 miles by air from Sofia to Dubrovnik), at least as the crow flies or even as the crappy car drives, if there were reasonable roads, which there aren't. We tried to go to Macedonia (only 70 miles to the border from Sofia) last September but were foiled by a crappy tour agency and some miscommunication. We looked into taking the train to Montenegro last November for our "flu vacation", but the trains there and back would have taken almost 4 days of our 5 day break. OK, we'll fly. Europe is full of cheap flights. Except not to Croatia from Bulgaria. Now have a biggish chunk of time in the prime summer travel season, and we considered going to the Alps (we love the mountains), but decided that while the Alps are relatively easy to get to on a short break, this might be the only time we could get to the "Western Balkans," as Lonely Planet calls the region. Yugoslavia road trip here we come!
Sort of. First we needed a car. We bought a car, in May, except that we didn't actually own it yet. By the time we left for the USA, we had a lovely red 1991 VW Passat parked on our lawn, that we had nick-named "хаиде" (pronounced "hai-day," Bulgarian for "Let's Go!"). We had paid for it, and had the keys for it, but it was still registered to someone we'd never met. We bought it from another American couple that teaches at the school, and they had bought it the year before from the wife of a Scottish teacher at the school, but they'd never gotten around to transferring the ownership. When we tried to take care of this at the end of the school year, we were foiled by busy schedules and Bulgarian bureaucracy (we had to have 6 months left on our residence cards to register a vehicle, and they were set to expire in June). We still drove хаиде around on errands in Sofia illegally, but figured crossing multiple non-European Union borders with an apparently-stolen vehicle was just asking for trouble. We had a very hard time getting in contact with the owner of the vehicle, so that the whole time we were in the USA, we didn't know if we would ever be able to get our car legal.
Once we were back to Sofia, thankfully the rightful owner of the car was very cooperative, and able to meet up on our first day back. We didn't have the time or patience to change car into our names, but we got notarized documents saying we're legal drivers of the vehicle, which seemed sketchy but we were told was good enough for now. Ready to go!
Except not really. We were really jet lagged, we had no itinerary, no plan, no reservations, hadn't unpacked from our trip to the US...vacation was stressing us out. (Me, at least. Shannon read a book or two, put her feet up, and still probably managed to accomplish more useful packing/unpacking than I did while I tried to plan our next trip.) So we laid low a bit, waiting until Friday to leave. Planning a circuit through Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, maybe Bosnia, maybe Italy, Slovenia, and Serbia (all in 12 days) we'd cover 2500 km or so in total. That would be not such a big trip in the US, but here, it's ambitious.
We decided to tackle the likely hardest drive (Sofia --> Dubrovnik, Croatia, 831 km) first, as it had the most border crossings and worst roads. Splitting it up into 2 days seemed like a good choice. We decided our first stop for the night would be Tirana, Albania, of which we knew almost nothing, except that it was up-and-coming and the former-artist mayor had used brightly colored paint to spruce up the drab Communist-era apartment blocks. Google Maps claimed it was a 7.5 hour drive. We figured Google Maps was wrong, but we had no real idea how wrong, or even in what direction it was wrong (it often over-estimated drive times in the rural Western US), and no one we knew had any better estimates for us.
It was really wrong. It took us almost 12 hours of driving, not 7.5. We hardly stopped at all. We never had to get gas (the beauty of going 40 mph all day). We didn't stop to eat (brought a cooler with snacks.) The border crossings weren't too bad (and they never cared to see our paperwork that we weren't stealing the car, of course). Even a 12 hour day of driving might not be too bad, in the US on the interstate with a book-on-tape to while away the hours on cruise control. But it wasn't that sort of a 12-hour drive.
хаиде is good at a few things. The heater works (not that helpful in August, but I'm sure we'll appreciate it eventually). The windshield wipers work. And as the name says, it goes. It got us all the way to Albania. хаиде is not so good at some other things. There is no A/C. There is no cruise control. The radio mostly doesn't work. The wheels feel wobbly. The transmission feels like it's going to fall out. About two hours into our journey, the exhaust system blew a whole. On our first descent down a mountain pass in Macedonia, we discovered the brakes were soft. Push-the-pedal-to-the-floor-to-get-a-response soft. Good times.
With the blown exhaust system, хаиде was LOUD. It didn't help that we had to have the windows down because it was hot and we didn't have any A/C. We started wearing ear-plugs, though this didn't really get rid the low-frequency rumble in your chest. Luckily, the brakes weren't OUT, just weak, and it was only a problem going downhill (though that seemed problem enough). We took the biggest "through" routes we could...there just aren't too many kilometers of modern expressways in these parts...at least they were all paved without giant potholes (unlike many Bulgarian roads). There was enough traffic on these windy mountain roads that going down in 3rd gear was OK. This helped me not have to use the brakes very much, which was nice.
We arrived at the Macedonian resort area of Lake Ohrid (Trivia Time: at 3 million years old and 300 m deep, Lake Ohrid is the oldest, deepest lake in the Balkans) around 6pm. Decision time. Stay at the beautiful lake ringed by mountains and try to get the car fixed, or push on (supposedly) 2 more hours (only 80 miles) to Tirana, the capital of Albania? So far Google had been told us a 6 hour drive would take 5. Not too bad. We had a hotel reservation in Albania, and none in Ohrid (on a Friday night in the tourist season). Tirana was a much bigger city (population close to a million). Where would we be more likely to find a mechanic to work on the weekend? A after a quick dip in the lake at the lovely but crowded and littered beach in Struga, we pushed on to Albania, hoping to get there by dark.
Albania is not the best choice for your 3rd country in a day with a crappy old car. It's really hard driving. We never left 3rd gear in Albania, except for stints in 2nd to climb the insanely steep route to the capital city (this was the main route, not some scenic detour through the mountains!). It is beautiful though (many, many mountains), as least from what we could see while it was still light out. It took us over 3 hours to go the 90 or so miles from the border to Tirana, all the while with crappy brakes and the loud drone of a muffler-less car. I hope as Albania develops they invest in a few more streetlights, as the lack thereof was also a bit of an extra challenge on the way in.
If you like hand car-washes, Albania is the place for you. Every roadside establishment (and many shacks that could hardly qualify as establishments) offers "Lavazh," usually advertised by a guy holding a high-powered hose spraying into the air, just waiting eagerly to remove your road filth. For a country that didn't have any drivers outside the communist dignitaries 15 years ago, they are now very very concerned with having a clean car. It's also a good place to find a slightly used but durable bunker. Approximately 750,000 semi-underground, concrete-and-steel bunkers (about enough for every family) were built during the Communist years, all over the countryside, and they're so indestructible that they're pretty much all still there. Very odd sights, the bunkers and the car washes of Albania.
We rolled into downtown Tirana around 10:00 pm local time. It seems like a really happening place. Lots of young people strolling the streets, the restaurants and bars seemed to be in full swing, and main square downtown (Trivia #2: "Skanderbeg Square", after a national hero that fought off the Turks for many years) was bright and felt safe to walk around. We amazingly found our hotel after not too long (we didn't have a good map or decent directions), and the friendly staff at Hotel Lugano even arranged for us to have our car looked at in the morning (Thanks!).
The mechanic that was luckily right below our hotel seemed confident and helpful, but we had to go through a few different people to translate our concerns. He didn't need our translators once he put the car up on lift though: the muffler was clear detached from the exhaust pipe, the front wheels were loose "Terrible. Like you are swimming on the road," and the brake fluid was low. He could fix the brakes today (Saturday morning), but would have to wait until Monday for rest.
Hmmmm.
Tirana was just supposed to be an overnight stop en route to Dubrovnik. Staying an extra 48 hours would kill the rest of the itinerary. No mountains in Slovenia. :(
But the mechanic was here, cheap, willing to do it, we were exhausted, who knows how hard it would be to find a mechanic in Croatia, and the "road Karma" seemed to suggest we should stay and check out Albania. So here we are. Haning out in Tirana.
During our past travels in Europe we have lamented not having a car, figuring it would be so much easier if we could just go places when we wanted on our own schedule. Here we are reminded of the albatrosses of car ownership as well. We still can't go where we want when we want, and it's expensive and stressful as well. I guess independent travel can be difficult no matter how you do it, unless you pay someone lots of money to take care of all your problems for you.
[Yes, I know we should have taken the car to the shop in Bulgaria before we left to check it out. I'll hide under the lame excuses that the previous owners had it all checked up (supposedly) before we got it in May, and we didn't know a mechanic in Sofia either, and we didn't have time, blah blah blah. It's just easier to be lazy when doing the "right" thing is so much harder, as most things still are in Bulgaria.]
So we'll figure out some interesting things to see in Albania, we'll adjust our schedule, and we'll have a great road trip, with brakes and hopefully without the need for earplugs.
Back when we found out we were heading to Bulgaria, we raided the local Bozeman Public Library for anything Bulgaria-related. Not surprisingly, that wasn't very much, and a lot of that only mentioned Bulgaria peripherally. Much of what I could find on the region focused on the former Yugoslavia. Intrigued, we planned to visit as soon as we could.
Last summer, I thought we'd head to Croatia. It's supposed to have a beautiful coastline, and it's really not that far (less than 300 miles by air from Sofia to Dubrovnik), at least as the crow flies or even as the crappy car drives, if there were reasonable roads, which there aren't. We tried to go to Macedonia (only 70 miles to the border from Sofia) last September but were foiled by a crappy tour agency and some miscommunication. We looked into taking the train to Montenegro last November for our "flu vacation", but the trains there and back would have taken almost 4 days of our 5 day break. OK, we'll fly. Europe is full of cheap flights. Except not to Croatia from Bulgaria. Now have a biggish chunk of time in the prime summer travel season, and we considered going to the Alps (we love the mountains), but decided that while the Alps are relatively easy to get to on a short break, this might be the only time we could get to the "Western Balkans," as Lonely Planet calls the region. Yugoslavia road trip here we come!
Sort of. First we needed a car. We bought a car, in May, except that we didn't actually own it yet. By the time we left for the USA, we had a lovely red 1991 VW Passat parked on our lawn, that we had nick-named "хаиде" (pronounced "hai-day," Bulgarian for "Let's Go!"). We had paid for it, and had the keys for it, but it was still registered to someone we'd never met. We bought it from another American couple that teaches at the school, and they had bought it the year before from the wife of a Scottish teacher at the school, but they'd never gotten around to transferring the ownership. When we tried to take care of this at the end of the school year, we were foiled by busy schedules and Bulgarian bureaucracy (we had to have 6 months left on our residence cards to register a vehicle, and they were set to expire in June). We still drove хаиде around on errands in Sofia illegally, but figured crossing multiple non-European Union borders with an apparently-stolen vehicle was just asking for trouble. We had a very hard time getting in contact with the owner of the vehicle, so that the whole time we were in the USA, we didn't know if we would ever be able to get our car legal.
Once we were back to Sofia, thankfully the rightful owner of the car was very cooperative, and able to meet up on our first day back. We didn't have the time or patience to change car into our names, but we got notarized documents saying we're legal drivers of the vehicle, which seemed sketchy but we were told was good enough for now. Ready to go!
Except not really. We were really jet lagged, we had no itinerary, no plan, no reservations, hadn't unpacked from our trip to the US...vacation was stressing us out. (Me, at least. Shannon read a book or two, put her feet up, and still probably managed to accomplish more useful packing/unpacking than I did while I tried to plan our next trip.) So we laid low a bit, waiting until Friday to leave. Planning a circuit through Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, maybe Bosnia, maybe Italy, Slovenia, and Serbia (all in 12 days) we'd cover 2500 km or so in total. That would be not such a big trip in the US, but here, it's ambitious.
We decided to tackle the likely hardest drive (Sofia --> Dubrovnik, Croatia, 831 km) first, as it had the most border crossings and worst roads. Splitting it up into 2 days seemed like a good choice. We decided our first stop for the night would be Tirana, Albania, of which we knew almost nothing, except that it was up-and-coming and the former-artist mayor had used brightly colored paint to spruce up the drab Communist-era apartment blocks. Google Maps claimed it was a 7.5 hour drive. We figured Google Maps was wrong, but we had no real idea how wrong, or even in what direction it was wrong (it often over-estimated drive times in the rural Western US), and no one we knew had any better estimates for us.
It was really wrong. It took us almost 12 hours of driving, not 7.5. We hardly stopped at all. We never had to get gas (the beauty of going 40 mph all day). We didn't stop to eat (brought a cooler with snacks.) The border crossings weren't too bad (and they never cared to see our paperwork that we weren't stealing the car, of course). Even a 12 hour day of driving might not be too bad, in the US on the interstate with a book-on-tape to while away the hours on cruise control. But it wasn't that sort of a 12-hour drive.
хаиде is good at a few things. The heater works (not that helpful in August, but I'm sure we'll appreciate it eventually). The windshield wipers work. And as the name says, it goes. It got us all the way to Albania. хаиде is not so good at some other things. There is no A/C. There is no cruise control. The radio mostly doesn't work. The wheels feel wobbly. The transmission feels like it's going to fall out. About two hours into our journey, the exhaust system blew a whole. On our first descent down a mountain pass in Macedonia, we discovered the brakes were soft. Push-the-pedal-to-the-floor-to-get-a-response soft. Good times.
With the blown exhaust system, хаиде was LOUD. It didn't help that we had to have the windows down because it was hot and we didn't have any A/C. We started wearing ear-plugs, though this didn't really get rid the low-frequency rumble in your chest. Luckily, the brakes weren't OUT, just weak, and it was only a problem going downhill (though that seemed problem enough). We took the biggest "through" routes we could...there just aren't too many kilometers of modern expressways in these parts...at least they were all paved without giant potholes (unlike many Bulgarian roads). There was enough traffic on these windy mountain roads that going down in 3rd gear was OK. This helped me not have to use the brakes very much, which was nice.
We arrived at the Macedonian resort area of Lake Ohrid (Trivia Time: at 3 million years old and 300 m deep, Lake Ohrid is the oldest, deepest lake in the Balkans) around 6pm. Decision time. Stay at the beautiful lake ringed by mountains and try to get the car fixed, or push on (supposedly) 2 more hours (only 80 miles) to Tirana, the capital of Albania? So far Google had been told us a 6 hour drive would take 5. Not too bad. We had a hotel reservation in Albania, and none in Ohrid (on a Friday night in the tourist season). Tirana was a much bigger city (population close to a million). Where would we be more likely to find a mechanic to work on the weekend? A after a quick dip in the lake at the lovely but crowded and littered beach in Struga, we pushed on to Albania, hoping to get there by dark.
Albania is not the best choice for your 3rd country in a day with a crappy old car. It's really hard driving. We never left 3rd gear in Albania, except for stints in 2nd to climb the insanely steep route to the capital city (this was the main route, not some scenic detour through the mountains!). It is beautiful though (many, many mountains), as least from what we could see while it was still light out. It took us over 3 hours to go the 90 or so miles from the border to Tirana, all the while with crappy brakes and the loud drone of a muffler-less car. I hope as Albania develops they invest in a few more streetlights, as the lack thereof was also a bit of an extra challenge on the way in.
If you like hand car-washes, Albania is the place for you. Every roadside establishment (and many shacks that could hardly qualify as establishments) offers "Lavazh," usually advertised by a guy holding a high-powered hose spraying into the air, just waiting eagerly to remove your road filth. For a country that didn't have any drivers outside the communist dignitaries 15 years ago, they are now very very concerned with having a clean car. It's also a good place to find a slightly used but durable bunker. Approximately 750,000 semi-underground, concrete-and-steel bunkers (about enough for every family) were built during the Communist years, all over the countryside, and they're so indestructible that they're pretty much all still there. Very odd sights, the bunkers and the car washes of Albania.
We rolled into downtown Tirana around 10:00 pm local time. It seems like a really happening place. Lots of young people strolling the streets, the restaurants and bars seemed to be in full swing, and main square downtown (Trivia #2: "Skanderbeg Square", after a national hero that fought off the Turks for many years) was bright and felt safe to walk around. We amazingly found our hotel after not too long (we didn't have a good map or decent directions), and the friendly staff at Hotel Lugano even arranged for us to have our car looked at in the morning (Thanks!).
The mechanic that was luckily right below our hotel seemed confident and helpful, but we had to go through a few different people to translate our concerns. He didn't need our translators once he put the car up on lift though: the muffler was clear detached from the exhaust pipe, the front wheels were loose "Terrible. Like you are swimming on the road," and the brake fluid was low. He could fix the brakes today (Saturday morning), but would have to wait until Monday for rest.
Hmmmm.
Tirana was just supposed to be an overnight stop en route to Dubrovnik. Staying an extra 48 hours would kill the rest of the itinerary. No mountains in Slovenia. :(
But the mechanic was here, cheap, willing to do it, we were exhausted, who knows how hard it would be to find a mechanic in Croatia, and the "road Karma" seemed to suggest we should stay and check out Albania. So here we are. Haning out in Tirana.
During our past travels in Europe we have lamented not having a car, figuring it would be so much easier if we could just go places when we wanted on our own schedule. Here we are reminded of the albatrosses of car ownership as well. We still can't go where we want when we want, and it's expensive and stressful as well. I guess independent travel can be difficult no matter how you do it, unless you pay someone lots of money to take care of all your problems for you.
[Yes, I know we should have taken the car to the shop in Bulgaria before we left to check it out. I'll hide under the lame excuses that the previous owners had it all checked up (supposedly) before we got it in May, and we didn't know a mechanic in Sofia either, and we didn't have time, blah blah blah. It's just easier to be lazy when doing the "right" thing is so much harder, as most things still are in Bulgaria.]
So we'll figure out some interesting things to see in Albania, we'll adjust our schedule, and we'll have a great road trip, with brakes and hopefully without the need for earplugs.
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